Ours
by Siarade
Standard disclaimer -- all characters herein belong to Marvel, no profit being made from this. Done for entertainment purposes only.
I give credit, here, to Alicia MacKenzie, because I _know_ without her fabulous "Nocturnes" series I never could have produced this, and to BJ Carlson, without whom's Paper Trails set this story would be different and probably very lacking. Hopefully, that makes it a tribute instead of plagiarism.
It isn't something you can prepare for, really, because you don't think about it. The first few hours, days, weeks months years decades after someone like her dies has nothing to do with the physical world, because your head can't get around it. Stopped, like the proverbial clock, your brain just locks your body down so it has nothing to do with the outside world. At least, that's what mine did.
Really, you don't feel it. I could have walked into a car and wouldn't have felt it, not in the slightest. I may have. I may have fell down ten flights of stairs, may have gotten shot in the chest, but I didn't and couldn't feel it. I couldn't hear anything but my breathing, my heart echoing like thunder in my ears. All I knew was that there was this unbelievable pain somewhere inside me, so without any real location to point to and say "it hurts _here_." It just hurts, all over, all encompassing.
Death, for the first ours-days-weeks- months-years-decades, doesn't have any physical reality. There's a body, hers, and it doesn't really look like her anymore, but you can't even see that. I couldn't - Domino's dead figure wasn't really there, and I wasn't really there, and all of the screaming I had in my head wasn't really there. I couldn't hear it.
What makes it real, after you've mindwalked through a funeral and a burial and a reception afterwards, is sitting in your room, sitting on the bed you shared with her, maybe three months or thirty years or one hundred and twenty eight days later, and realizing that there are a thousand things of hers that you don't know what to do with.
Get rid of them? Never.
Keep them? How, where...why? To stand in the shower and stare at her shampoo, open the cap and smell it, and realize how it smells like a shadow of her, absent of the scent that is only her, that can't be bottled or manufactured, and how that scent doesn't exist in anymore.
So that's why, all this time later, I'm only just now getting to the physical reality that she's dead.
There are all these little pieces of her life left behind, in this house of ours. Everyone who knew her expects me to go to our weapons room, where all of her babies stand upright and shining in their cabinets. Where they expect me to remember her. But that's not where Domino is, not for me. Everyone else puts her there when really, I'm one of the only one's that has a right to picture her with all of her guns and armor, because I fought with her, sometimes toe-to-toe, sometimes shoulder to shoulder. Most of them just heard about her, or watched, or guessed. I was her partner – more than anybody, in battle and blood and everything. No one has more right to see her there than I do, because she saved me a hundred thousand times, standard procedure just like I saved her a hundred thousand times. So everybody seems to think this is where she would exist for me. But she doesn't need to be there for me. We taught each other that we weren't just and always soldiers. She's not in with her guns -- she's right here, in our bedroom with me. Lying on our bed, the bedspread pulled up to her shoulder, lying beside me under the soft plum-colored comforter, holding the blanket where I can smell her skin. Her face on the pillow, that warm cleanness of her hair draped across the cotton.
What am I supposed to do -- throw the sheets out? We bought them together, for flonq's sake. We dragged ourselves to one of those Bath and Bed places that sells matching curtains, towels and toilet seats. We _built_ this goddamned house for us, and I'm supposed to throw all the little pieces of her out? Fuck you. Fuck you for ever thinking it.
I don't swear very well in English, according to Dom. Not as creative, I guess, as the old fashioned native tongue. But she did it well enough for both of us, and in Spanish, too.
No, I'm keeping the sheets. And the towels, and the half-empty bottle of her shampoo and conditioner.
And I'm keeping her shoes, all of them. I've got her humvee polished like diamonds in the garage.
I hate Frosted Mini-Wheats, and I'm even keeping those, stale as they probably are. Maybe even disintegrated.
But I clean – Domino hated cleaning, but she put up with the vacuum so she wouldn't live in squalor, and we swapped jobs when we needed to, although she rescued me from the bathrooms and I saved her from having to do the oven.
See -- that's it. There it is. The physical reality that even after the love of your life, second in chronological order but no less in your heart, and me lucky to have loved twice, dies in your bed, you still have to vacuum, and do laundry, scrub the toilet. Dust and dirt and grime and the oily spots that grow around lightswitches still accumulate, as if the whole rest of the world doesn't realize or care that she's dead and you could give a flying flonq about oily spots on lightswitches and flicks of dirt in the hallway and greasy marks on the countertop and all of the laundry that's grown in your bathroom.
Get out of bed, don't let her pull the blanket all the way up to my face so I can smell her, right? Get up, get back to the whole physical reality where other people actual exist enough so you can hear them. I can see Dom, lying in our bed, the way she lays on her side so I can see the best of her curves. Like the smell on the pillowcases. She's here in this house every second, every smell and sound of the day, and I'm supposed to leave, pack up and sell it or burn it or do anything to make my father stop worrying so flonqing much about me.
Kitchen - there's the wood floor she let me have, but its her oak instead of my walnut. Her curtains - instead of my blue, her green and white. Her white refrigerator, my copper pots and pans. We fought over every inch of this house, from under the ground up. She wanted three levels - I wanted two. I wanted a sun room - she wanted a pool. I wanted the living room in blue, she wanted it in green.
Dining room - I wanted wood paneling on the walls, she wanted wrought iron. I wanted a heavy walnut table to go with my heavy walnut floor that I wanted to go from the kitchen through the front room to the dining room, and she wanted a wrought iron table (with a glass top) to go with her wrought iron paneling (although I admit, the paneling was tastefully subtle) and wrought iron light fixture. I won that one - but it was oak, not walnut. I seduced her over minestrone soup here. We had my parents and X-Force here for dinner on my birthday last year and she gave me a Lexus and a custom bright-as-chrome pulse rifle.
And the fourth bedroom, which I can't open the door to, and which was stripped of everything but the spotless soft blue carpet, so that you'd never know what it had been meant for and what it had never been able to be.
The den downstairs - the bar that Domino wanted, an authentic block of cherry wood and brass from some 1920s jazz place occasioned by gangsters, against the library that I wanted. Well, that one kinda worked out, although if I get a hold of the good Scotch and trip into the Jane Austen section, I usually swear off alcohol for a few months. Six years ago we got drunk down here together and fell asleep on the floor, with my arms around her and her head tucked under my chin.
Our house was a war zone until it was finished, and we both loved the fight. And we both liked it when we lapsed into complacency with each other's choice, when I grew used to the oak flooring and the green living room and she started to appreciate the classic dining table and the handsome leather books in our den.
And then, of course, the fourth bedroom, which neither of us has been able to face. That's the only time I've ever caught Domino crying without any pride about me seeing her do it. Standing outside the door, her forehead against the wood, hand on the doorknob. She heard me, probably because I couldn't help the strangled sound that came out, and turned her face toward me with this horrible look that just about killed me. I felt it right then - this squeezing in my chest like God had put his fist around my heart. I pulled her away from the door and carried her back to our bedroom and laid her down in the sheets, smoothing her hair on the pillow, and held her until she cried herself first sick and then asleep.
You can't believe how much stuff we have. We were so nomadic, so unsettled for so long, that settling down was almost imaginary. But Apocalypse was finally gone, and there's nothing that will make _home_ seem more important than a war. I knew that the first time around – but I got to fulfill it the second. I've never had a home, not like this, not so real and here and made out of concrete and steel. She said it and I said yes, and we married ourselves to this house so that we could have a reality for each other, a thing to come back to, to center ourselves on in the physical because so much of us was in the abstract, the mental and emotional. To unite ourselves in this single foundation, moored with concrete and steel, fastened to the earth. To balance ourselves – the psi-link on one side, the house on the other. Corporeal and non-corporeal. Soul and body.
What, you think I didn't understand normal things? Like the nuclear family concept, just because I never had or was a part of one that lasted more than two seconds? I've always wanted the 2.5 kids and cable TV and the family dog who beats up the family cat who eats the family goldfish. Maybe it looked different when I was 25 because of where I was, but the concept was still the same.
Dom wanted it too, in the same terrified, hopeless way I did. And in the same terrified way – with mouth blazing antagonism and eyes hiding the shame of fear – she told me she was pregnant, and in the same terrified way I hugged her over it and told her "good."
And the doctor, who with exhaustion instead of terror told me it was dead, it was a little girl born three months too early and dead.
Even the baby had a ton of things, all of which we got rid of. Gave them away, to charity and children's hospital wards and watched the empty feeling stay in our house, because the things couldn't carry the emptiness away with them when they went. I got lost in FAO Schwartz finding it all and then we gave it all away, split it out between faceless people who can never know what they meant to us, this thing which neither of us ever expected to have and neither of us, in the end, got. Teddy bears and crib and high chair and the little no spill cup that she would have got when she was older. The absolute minute that normal would have set in -- married with a kid -- was the minute God blinked at us and turned everything back to disbelief. The perfect union of us, dead. Our house is still here and alive, but the living us that we almost had is dead.
I have been a soldier all my life, and I have seen the dead in the worst of deaths. And I can still see that dead infant face, grey, eyes closed, but I can't see Domino's face anything but alive.
I can't see her dead. She walks in the hallways of our house, her feet leave impressions in the carpet. She walks through the dark, past the moonlit window, splitting shadows through the room as she moves towards our bed. She moves past all the things that she's placed in this house, the way she made it hers so much that it's not mine unless she's here too, because it's a projection of us both and it can't be turned individual. It's not "Nathan's house," or "Cable's house," or even, as Logan has put it, "the fucked up version a' Oz where the Tinman's shacks up with Dorothy." All of the small tables and plants and picture frames and even the jumbled mess in our linen closet. All of the mismatched three-quarters or one-third full bottles of sunscreen and lotion and the medicine closet – not kit, closet – with all of the cotton gauze and betadine and steristrips and sutures and splints and morphine and antiseptic that we collected for our health, and the apron in the kitchen pantry that she once wore as she carried out a tray of meat to the barbecue in the back yard, the apron as the _only_ thing she wore besides her smug half-grin as she walked up to me at the grill, the apron that said, "Screw the Cook – Kiss Me."
All us. All her and me.
I can see her in that apron, walking across the yard now as I watch from the second story window of our bedroom. I can see her in the dark, in the daylight, in the shower when I've got my forehead pressed to the tile and the spray scalds my back, I turn my head and see her smiling that smug seduction of a smile at me. Here, I'll close my eyes and prove it to you – open, and she's still here.
This house breathes her, and I'm supposed to be dead in that somehow, but it breathes her alive and there's no way I can kill that, kill myself in this house when she's here.
I see her alive in every room in the house. I can't picture her dead at all, not even when it happened right there in the grip of my hands, but I can see her alive in every room. I know how she sat in her leather sofa, with her feet bare and curled up under her like a little kid. I can see her performing the straining trick of her lat workout, where all the veins in her arms look ready to burst through her skin and sweat makes her slick, how she makes a challenge out of the way we run together in the woods behind our house, and how her back always laughs at me when I run two steps behind her because I love the view.
I can see her standing in the kitchen in one of my t-shirts that touches about above her knees as she makes herself breakfast. The light is coming through the window to hit the back of her hair, and she's shifting her weight as she scrambles the egg over the stove. The curtain is making a little shadow on her shoulder.
I can see her shadow move across the bedroom, in the dark like she used to as she returned silent-footed from the bathroom, moving to her side of the bed. She slides herself under the comforter and turns on the lamp as she turns off the TV, puts her hand on her book before turning to look over her shoulder at me. I love the tough glitter in her eyes as she catches me watching her. She rolls her shoulders and lays back against her pillow – there's a new run of grey in her hair, behind her ear. Just one strand. I pick my hand up, set it there – all my silver against her one single line. She meets my gaze to answer all my questions for me, and I trail my fingers to her neck. She reaches out before I break, sliding her hands under my arms and around my back, shrinking my chest with the strength of her grip, not letting me breathe. She squeezes harder and harder, vicing my ribcage between her arms, and I hold on tight to the pain she's giving me. I can see the points of her shoulderblades as I hold on to her.
I'll open my eyes tonight and see it. I'll open my eyes right now and see her.
Please, Bright Lady, I'll open my eyes and see her.