This Is The Oath

A lot of people must be looking for him right now but Saturn isn't one of them. And yet here she is, and here he is, slumped against a vending machine, the single source of light on this floor, like a moth blindly following flame into the night.

Plu doesn't notice her. His eyes are closed. Maybe he's sleeping standing up, like horses do. Maybe he’s not allowed to sleep, just like she isn’t. She knew why once, but she’s forgotten.

She almost leaves, but then she notices how the light of the vending machine makes his skin glow a pale blue, one that is reminiscent of the locket around her neck. It doesn’t glow often, and it shouldn’t anyway. The cast makes him look like he's a paper cutout of a person instead of the real thing and, for some reason, that makes her start to walk down the corridor towards him.

His face is all tired shadows. She knows why. A few days ago seven of them had perished, and they won't be coming back. She watched and listened to the silent air for their unspoken last words, watched Plu dig a grave for seven all by himself.

He doesn't move as she slips loose change from her pocket into the machine. A can clatters down. She crouches and reaches in, and when she straightens, he is staring at her. She slips the can of iced coffee into his hand. Neither of them speak.

After a moment, she turns and walks away.

—

The sun winks against the water as they take off over it. Saturn tries to see past it, to the seafloor, but it's too deep. They break through the clouds, and she leans back and closes her eyes.

Only as the ship hits the dock days later does she realize that maybe she was looking for herself down there; a tiny, smooth pebble that the light never reaches.

—

She knows the moment she sees his face. He flinches when she answers the door, like he'd been half-hoping she wouldn't.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “I don't know why I—I'll go.” He has one hand resting on the doorframe. His knuckles are white.

“Want to come in?” she asks.

He stares down at her socks. “Yes, please,” he murmurs finally.

He follows her into the bedroom. For a split second, he casually thinks the girls are in the other four rooms with the doors closed, but no one else is home. She sits on the bed, back against the wall. After a moment, he sits beside her.

A long time passes. He reaches for her hand at some point, and she lets him. He’s very, very warm.

“It's not so bad a number,” she says eventually. “Two.”

Plu stares down at their hands and says, finally, “I guess not.”

—

It snows and storms for a week straight in August.

“Would you believe me if I told you it was my fault?” Plu asks her.

She gently shuts the cupboard before turning to face him. “What?”

“You saw it happen. You were there. Everything points to me—my powers.” He can say it without pausing now.

“No, I wouldn't.” She chews on her bottom lip. “Believe you.”

He made no movement. “I’ve been here longer than you have. I know how things are supposed to run. It finally didn’t.”

“But there’s nothing that could be done.” To prevent it.

“Oh, well.” He sounds so, so tired, but there's a smile in his voice. “Still keeps me up at night.”

“I don’t sleep either,” she says, and he realizes how accustomed he is to hearing her voice.What else he realizes, though, is that he doesn’t understand what she’s actually saying to him.

“I know you don’t.”

“Did you know horses sleep standing up?”

“Really?” he asks. “Why?”

“I don't know.” She is tired too. “I've forgotten.”

—

He knocks on her door again. They sit on the couch and watch television. It’s a rerun of an older Hollywood show. He translates the funniest parts for her, still laughing.

It grows late. The sky falls asleep, the ground below it wakes. He leans over and kisses her cheek, then her lips, then her neck. She rests her hand along the curve of his skull, feather-light. The shorn sides of his hair itch at her jaw. She can smell the platinum in it, sharp and chemical, but his lips are soft against her throat—a mere inch away from the heart-shaped locket resting on her collarbone.

She wonders if he’ll feel the urge to touch it, hold it between his fingers. Maybe relieve her from the locket.

He pulls back before she can ask him to and smiles as he tells her goodnight. The feeling of his mouth on her neck remains until she falls asleep.

—

After a few months, she no longer wants to stop, so they don’t.

—

Learned insomnia, is what they call it. You’ve forced your body to stay awake longer than it should and now it’s forgotten that it’s allowed to sleep.

“I’m done with everything,” says Plu. He’s thinner now, but his voice is just as loud.

Saturn says, “You can’t call it quits just because you don’t like what’s happening,” and Plu throws a half-hearted glare her way. The red beam from his eyes bounces off her arm and lands somewhere between the couch cushions.

“I can and will,” says Plu. His hair is dark red now, like a quiet fire. “But as it happens, this is not one of those times. Not yet. I’ve still my oath to fulfill.”

That almost makes her realize her own with a jolt, but everything around her is so muffled right now she can’t even see straight.

Saturn’s never been anything more than moderately drunk. One night just before their arrival Uranus had procured a bottle of red from Lord knows where and the two of them piled into the bath behind the locked bathroom door, talking and drinking and pretending they weren’t fucking terrified of being discovered. It felt a little like this.

That was what she thought would be the beginning of the easy job they had to do. After she had taken her oath.

She laughs and curls onto her side, away from him, her cheek pressed into her own palm. “I’m so tired the room is spinning.” Spinning she can take, as long as she can get herself to sleep.

“I’m so tired that I could…” Plu loses his train of thought.

“Don’t bother,” Plu says. He’s looking away from her now. There’s something hard in his face that she doesn’t like. “Worse things can happen when we let ourselves off guard again.”

“Like what?” she says immediately, then wishes she hadn’t. Saturn’s not an idiot. She doesn’t need to imagine the worst that could happen. It’s why she’s placed here; why they’re placed here.

As he glances at her sideways then back down, though, a faint quirk to his lips, she realizes for the first time that while she’s not inexperienced, it was centuries ago when Plu walked on the ground of Earth for the first time. She hates how painfully inadequate she feels when there’s a look on his face that promises he’s accomplished most of the missions he had in his time. And she can’t even complete one.

Plu, who’s been quiet for some time now, suddenly closes his eyes. She sees rather than hears him take a deep breath. He drops a hand in his lap and covers his face with the other.

Something in her chest twists. “Hey,” she whispers. Plu’s hands twitch. “Hey,” she says again, nudging him with her knee.

He lets his hand drop from his face to his lap. His mouth is tense, and he won’t look at her. “Yeah?”

“Let’s go visit.” His expression is like a stone under the shifting glow of a roaring fire. She bites her lip and says, “It’s been a while.”

That gets a reaction, though what it is she isn’t quite sure. She thought she knew all his expressions, catalogued in her mind and her memory. After all, it’s just the two of them now.

His eyes move up carefully, deliberately, until they meet hers. Just then, everything outside goes silent. Through the window the heavy wind, now muffled and tender, fading away into a soft breeze. The look in his eyes darkens but does not waver.

His lips part, and she finds herself staring. She feels dizzy and she doesn’t think it's fatigue. The only thing she can feel is the heat where his hip is resting against her knee.

“I can go there alone,” she says softly. It sounds like a challenge.

“I’ll go with you,” murmurs Plu. His eyes are dark and deep and full of things she doesn’t recognize. Saturn should look away.

She does.

—

“Do you dream?” she asks, face set on the horizon.

He glances at her in the mirror, where he's brushing his hair. “Sometimes.”

“About what?”

“Once I dreamt of the dark, restless sky—an upside down cavern nobody is meant to explore. I dreamt about lightning, and a girl falling from the sky.” She hopes he gets it. If it was about a girl rising up from the depths of the ocean, moon-pale and eyes closed, then maybe.

“I dreamt about a river,” she says. “A river that flows out of a city and into the sky.”

—

“I remembered why,” she tells him, on the last morning. He doesn't answer. “It's so they can run away. The horses.”

She stands with uncertainty, unlike her unwavering voice. “I also know why I can’t go to sleep,” she says, one corner of her mouth upturned.

Saturn, still not sure exactly how she got to this clarity, feels like she shouldn’t be here. She should be perched on the edge. It is why she came here at the edge of the century; she’s supposed to be far away, by the edge of humanity, on the edge of the world, the edge of the horizon. If it wasn’t for the locket around her neck, pulling her down as it always has, she feels like she could’ve flown away.

Pandora’s Keeper, they call her. She wonders why she’s tasked with something this heavy. And she was simply curious about the so-called Pandora’s Box—contained in a locket so small, as it so appears. Never would she have thought what it could release, that it cost nearly all the guardians to suppress the calamity that she brought. Nearly all of them, all seven of her friends.

She’s up at the break of dawn. The sun has yet to rise. The only light on is the bedside lamp. He’s wearing dark grey and his hair is spread around his head, but in the soft light Plu looks so much older and more graceful than Saturn can ever imagine being.

She doesn’t want to scream. This whole situation feels very surreal. She takes a deep breath. Something cold and heavy sinks down through her chest even as she nods, eyes on the blanket. She feels strange, like she's coming to the end of the line on the last bus of the night, her stop miles and miles back on the dark road.

She knows what to do; she has to get off now.

He can’t leave, he has to stay behind. He has his own oath to fulfill, and she has hers. Fingers wrapped tightly around the glowing locket, as if she is terrified to let even a peak of it shine through.

She presses her lips to his temple. He stirs, but doesn't wake. “Everything will be okay without me,” she says. “The river won’t hurt you. Make it take you to the sky.”

She leaves, closing the door quietly behind her. She's jumping out of the boat, and the currents are strong. They'll probably drag her all the way to the riverbed.

She thinks she’ll be okay down there.