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You see her again after a month.
The world is dying now. There is little left. You have made sure of that. In the back of the van that you have driven to her, the bodies are still rotting, becoming something bigger than themselves, bigger than you, bigger than anything they could have ever dreamed of.
You are not cruel. You know what they will think of you, but you’re not. This is a quiet death. A gentle one. In the end, they will all be dead, and so will you, and everything will be better.
Harley is standing in front of you. You can see the horror in her eyes; the way her mascara is beginning to run. You remember, when you were in a different body, how you had kissed it from her cheeks, held her gently, pretended that this world could have ended differently.
It’s too late now. There’s no going back.
Truthfully, it would be crueler to leave her. You know how much she hates being alone.
“You came back,” Harley whispers, just loud enough to be heard. You take a step forward. No matter how much you pretend, you are not a God. She took that from you, with her gentle hands and loving smile, and you cannot get that back, no matter how much blood is on your hands, no matter how many prayers you listen to with violent teeth, no matter how much you love her. She has ruined you, completely and utterly, and in doing so, she has saved the world.
(She has not saved you. You know how this will end: in the exact way it began. The Green will swallow you whole, and you will be with her as much as you can be with anyone. This is how it must go. You know this.)
Still, she is trembling. She’s not quite crying yet, but it’s a near thing.
“I promised, didn’t I?” you say, with sharp teeth. You imagine how her death must go. It shouldn’t be painful. You wouldn’t do that to her. It will be quick, and not quite gentle, but you will kiss her chapped lips as she rots away into something irreversible.
“Ivy,” Harley whispers, a hand over her mouth, and—
Oh.
She’s looking at the bodies in the van.
You wonder if she is surprised. She shouldn’t be. You’ve already given your sacrifice. You died for them. For this city. For this godforsaken world. You died for her, and she brought you back.
“It’ll be quick,” you say, reaching a hand to her warm cheek. “I promise.”
Harley shakes her head, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there, as she falls to her knees, looking at the bodies in the van; looking at the bodies all around her. There is little left. The city has fallen, and you have protected her, but everything must end, at some point.
She looks up at you. Here, you are the God that she was always afraid you would become. You kiss her forehead, run your fingers through her hair. “I came back, Harley. What now?”
She shakes her head.
This is better, you remind yourself, choking down the guilt as she trembles. This is better. She wouldn’t want to be alone. In a way, this is a mercy. With all the humans gone, made into something better, something more, it will be quiet, here, a type of quiet she couldn’t handle.
“Trust me,” you whisper. “You brought me back. Now trust me.”
(Maybe Harley was a type of God too, with her trembling shoulders, with her will, with her love that brought you to life again, with her love that took your Godhood with violent teeth and a bloody smile.)
“Promise me, Red,” Harley whispers as you kneel in front of her. “Don’t make it hurt. Please.”
She was never supposed to plead to you. You were supposed to be a God, but not her God. Not supposed to tremble and shake at your feet. You are trying to save her, and she doesn’t understand that, doesn’t understand that this is mercy, this is forgiveness, this is salvation. You are letting her into heaven. You are washing her of her sins. You are making her whole. With this, your two loves will finally become one: Harley and the world, the world and Harley.
You cup her cheek. “I promise.”
You kiss her, and as you do, you let the Green escape you, traveling into her body, forming its roots in her mouth and against her tongue. She smiles, even as it pulls her apart, and some selfish part of you is grateful that the Green did not make you a liar. You do not stop kissing her, even as her skin begins to peel, even as it becomes the same shade as yours, even as the plants grow in her stomach and sprout out against the skin, bloody and a mess and too violent for the woman you love.
This is mercy, you remind yourself. This is mercy.
She is smiling the whole time. Her lips taste like blood. The plants eat her alive, make her something better, something painless, something that this world will finally love.
You know that she has been in pain since the moment she was born. The men ruined her, with their hungry mouths and sharp smiles, with their rotten hands and broken claws. They took her home and they tore her apart with violent mouthfuls, and they left her, waiting for someone to look at her again, trembling in her loneliness, willing to be eaten by the world just to feel like she was a part of it.
This will fix her. You know it will. You will love her, even when you become a part of her, a part of the whole world, and you know that the world will be forced to love her back. She won’t be in pain anymore. She won’t have to apply the makeup that drips down her face just to pretend she is something worth loving. She won’t have to go crawling back to all the people who tore her into pieces. She can rest. She can sleep. She can be loved.
“I love you,” you say against her lips, even as her skin has fallen apart, ripped open, even as you are killing her. She deserves to know it. This is all out of love. You have done this for her, really; her and the world, the only two things that matter.
The plants are cutting her open, her mouth agape, and she no longer has lips for you to kiss. You hold her instead. Her beautiful blonde hair has begun to melt into the grass at your feet. You wonder how much longer it will be before there is nothing left of her. Until she will finally be at peace.
Before then, you will not leave her. You promised her, after all. This will be quick, and it will be painless, and she will not be alone.
You lie down next to her. Her muscle has grown into moss, her bones into wood, her cells into little bugs that eat the remnants of her alive. You stay there, staring as the sun slowly sets over this world that you have saved.
There’s no one left. You had saved her for the end. It was selfish, you know, to wait until you saw her one last time, but you’ve done your duty. You’ve tasted Godhood one last time, watched as men kneeled screaming at your feet, watched as you have destroyed them all. When you killed them, it was not gentle. Not like with Harley. You tore them apart, with a kiss, with a breath, will a punch, and you watched as they cried for mercy. You don’t regret those murders. Sometimes, when you had driven the endless road at night, you had imagined their blood stained onto your hands, your mouth, your skin. You tore them into pieces, limb by limb, ate them with your starving mouth, so fast you could not taste them as you swallowed. This is a better world. This is better.
You can’t see Harley in what lies next to you anymore, but this is a final resting place as good as any other.
This is salvation. There are no cars revving down the city’s intersection. No gunshots. No bloodshed. Just this. Just your love.
You stare at what used to be Harley, and you swallow down the guilt.
(You wonder what she thought would happen when she brought you back. If you would love her like you used to. If you would die for her again. If you would sacrifice your plans for the world just to save her. But in the end, you are not a woman who will let herself make the same mistake twice.)
“Tell me,” you say, to the plants, to the dirt, to the sky, “was it painless?”
You hope it was. She deserves a death like that. Quick and gentle. Nothing like the man who had torn her apart with their teeth, burrowing into her marrow, licking her meat off her bones. Something slower than that. Like falling asleep. Like dreaming. Like when she had kissed you, soft, careful, still hungry but cutting you into smaller digestible pieces, something that could be loved.
In the same way, you know that your own death should not be that way. If anything, it should be violent, all consuming, the world’s revenge.
You know that when you fall asleep next to her decomposing flesh, you will not wake up. The Green will overtake you, and you will become her. You will become all of them; from the poet at the truckstop to the men who you had eaten whole. It’s all the same, in the end.
“I love you,” you whisper, one last time, to the plants, to the dirt, to the sky. To her. To Harley.
You will not apologize, but when you lie down next to her body, perhaps this is the closest that you can get to that.
You close your eyes. The world is silent. The animals are dead, and you will be too, soon enough.
You close your eyes, and the Green eats you whole, overtakes you, sharp teeth, painless despite your pleas.
You close your eyes, and you become her, become everyone, become the world.