An unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart. She was left alone to pluck the last of those green pricks off the roses they once picked together. On her own now, in the place they couldn’t stay away from. The trees stretched abnormally high. “I wonder how the birds can breathe up there”, she eased out between breaths sitting in the grass-filled dirt. Her fingers and her toes were cold; they had been for the last hour no matter how hard she blew or how tightly she held them together. Her throat was cold too. It was no use. 

​

“I wonder how we would breathe up there”. His reply was a subtle one. His eyes soared the sky just as well, appreciating the crooked branches and how they shook against the background color of a pale hue. At the sound of his voice, her head quickly turned in his direction. He had always been startling. She studied his rounding features, noticing how his skin seemed cold and blotched. The usual crimson of his cheeks were instead the same insipid blue of the sky. Lacking flavor. Lacking vigor. Lacking interest. 

​

Her stare was harsh. The knit of her eyebrows held together tightly as her fingers grappled drastically on the grass below, so drastic that it began to slip finely from its roots. He turned to knock her gaze, “What?” his voice low, confused, amused? 

​

Did he think this was funny? A game? He took her as a joke, but was she really surprised? No. Not at all. 

​

“You’re not supposed to be here”, her voice cracked in the midst of it; being strong in front of him was never her strength. “What do you want from me, you’ve already k-”, 

​

“But this is our spot," His interjection stopped her rushed words. “Why wouldn’t I be welcomed?”. The chuckle that left the back of his throat displayed hurt. Again, he was pretending he didn’t ruin every chance they ever had, pretending he wasn’t bothered by her disgust of him. She pulled in her bottom lip just to bite off the skin despite their attempts to finally heal; although, she never had the peace or patience of time for that regeneration to occur. He would always scold her for it. 

​

“Why wouldn’t I be welcomed?” echoed in her scattered deadend thoughts. She wished to scream right in his face, to push him back into the dirt, ruining the pretty pristinity of his white tank top and bloodying up his face with his own rings that she would have snatched off his broken fingers to cover on her own. But she was too kind for that, “too soft”, he would always say. 

​

He sat and waited for a reply. She didn’t have one to give, only salted water threatened to depart from the corners of her eyes yet again. He brushed off that look which he had seen so many times before, ignoring the tears that dropped as soon as he turned his head back to the trees above. The chillness of the surrounding air in November could never match his coldness of heart. 

​

“Do you not remember that day?” Through the blur her eyes steadily studied him so. “What day?” His tone was flat as he decided the grass below him had something better to say, so he plucked and plucked away instead of facing the torment of her wet cheeks. “The day we did that”, She pointed back. The tree they sat in front of. It’s 152 years old, he once said. 

​

When he looked up his light brown eyes collided with her contrasting dark pupils, but only for a moment. Then he turned his head back to focus on their tree. It was marked by a carved heart, the initials “N&A” stained. But what he hadn’t noticed before was the N that had been scratched over repeatedly, almost as if it was an attempt to claw him from the world. His face frowned upon instinct but immediately soothed soon after. He remembered this act and he was there to see it. He remembered that day and what had occurred. The suppression that he was the cause of it all had finally resurfaced. 

​

“Where have you been?” His voice shakes, rings then fades out into silence. Emptiness. He looks over; She was no longer with him. 

​

---

​

Nightfall beholds. The sun reverts back to the middle of the sky and her fingers bleed just for him as she lashes out against the darkness of the bark. He can do nothing but watch the struggle from inside, confining himself behind those glass walls that she hated so much. He began pacing on the parquet with bare feet and a scowl, his eyes dead set on her perturbed estate, watching as she sprawled brutally at the tree in front of her. “Pathetic." He shook his head and dropped it in annoyance, but the look on his face only held concern. How could she be so foolish for me? As he plummets to unease, the sound of a door removes him from his minuscule reverie. 

​

Upon her arrival he becomes transfixed with anger, “Why did you do that?” He raises question as she stalks towards him. His voice was an alarming echo of depth through the emptiness of wood and white. No, surprisingly it’s not the anger that ravishes him this time. It’s incertitude. 

​

“Why did you hurt me?” She breathes in between, calm yet disordered. The air is silent between them. Tension builds, becoming muddy and thick like a gruesome swamp. Silence befalls and nothing but exasperated breaths take up the surrounding space. It suffocates the room, vacuuming it, making it smaller and smaller until the two are seemingly face to face. 

​

Why did you hurt me? He replays it again and again, but he has no answer for neither himself nor her. His heated breath breathes down on her face full of grey, “That.. I’m uncertain of.”

 

“That’s too bad…” Her voice speaks up to him in a harsh whisper. Eventually, her bare, bruised, black and benign feet spin against the polished wood and carry her out of his line of view. “Where are you going?!” He calls but she fails to answer.

​

The door shuts - no, slams - rattling the ground with it; he’s immediately on his heels and he’s going after her. She goes back to that tree, that very tree that they had once shared. Back to their ending, the source of his nightmares. 

​

One look behind her to make sure he’s there, and of course, he is. She eyes him deliriously as she rounds the bark until her frame disappears. Quickly, he walks to where she once was, only to be met with an empty space. He rounds it once, twice, maybe four or six times, yet she is nowhere to be seen. When he finally rounds the tree for the eighth time, time has changed. Now night, the sky was black and it was colder than before. His hands were bloody with his nails and fingertips peeling just like that of hers. His feet were bare, bruised, black, brutish and baneful; and when he finally had a look at the mess he made, he couldn’t bear with what was left for him to find. 

​

Her flesh. It was on the ground, practically buried in the dirt, but most of her limbs could still be found. Anata was lying still with crossed arms and hands conjoined to keep his dagger through her heart in place. Pale. Blue. Her. Lacking flavor, vigor, interest. The last piece of the puzzle is as if her life was his only conquest or a game of chess. 

​

“I’m uncertain of many things too…” a coarse voice reminiscent of her tone whispered, but her lips didn’t move. Instead, salted tears at the corner of her eyes halted, but this time they would never drop. “Mainly with your ideas of my death… But then I died.” 

​

His frame stood above her corpse, there was nothing left for him, there was nothing left of her; and as those frantic and feverish thoughts begin to realize this, his hands shoot up and settle on the brown tattered hair, just to tug at it drastically violent that his scalp begins to bleed. 

​

The blood dripping down his forehead. The red hot scorching pain in his chest. He feels the uncertainty of heat behind his eyes. His cheeks are wet; he’s on his knees for the first time. 

​

Nico, what have you done? 

“What have I done?” 

You’ve killed her. 

“I’ve killed her.”