As Butch turned back to his roommate, he did not like the expression on the brother’s face. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what.”
“Like I’m the solution to it all.”
There was a long moment. “But you are, cop. And you know it.”
Butch walked over and stood chest to chest with the male. “What if we’re wrong?”
“The Prophecy is not ours. It is the property of history. As it was foretold, so it shall be. First as the future, then as the present when the time is nigh. And after that, with recording, it shall be the sacred past, the saving of the species, the end of the war.”
Butch thought of his dreams, the ones that had been waking him up during the day. The ones that he refused to talk to his Marissa about. “What if I don’t believe any of that.”
What if I can’t believe it, he amended.
“You assume destiny requires your permission to exist.”
Unease scurried through his veins like rats in a sewer, finding all kinds of familiar paths. And meanwhile, as freely as the anxiety roamed, he became trapped. “What if I’m not enough?”
“You are. You have to be.”
“I can’t do any of it without you.”
Familiar eyes, diamond with navy-blue rims, softened, proving that even the hardest substance on earth could yield if it chose to. “You have me, forever. And if you require it, you can take my faith in you, for as long as you need it.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“We never do,” V said roughly. “And it doesn’t matter even if we did.”
The brother shook his head, as if he were remembering parts and parcels of his own life, routes taken by force or coercion, dubious gifts pressed into his unwilling hands, mantles tossed over his shoulders, heavy with the manipulations and desires of others. Given that Butch knew his roommate’s past as well as he knew his own, he wondered about the nature of the so-called destiny theory Vishous spoke of.
Maybe the intellectual construct of fate, of destiny, was just a way to frame all the shitty fucking things that happened to people. Maybe all the proverbial bad luck that rained down on the heads of essentially good folks, all that Murphy’s Law, was actually not luck at all, just the impersonal nature of chaos at work. Maybe all the disappointment and injury, the loss and alienation, the chips off the soul and the heart that were inevitable during any mortal’s tenure upon the ashes and the dust to which they were doomed to return, were not preordained or personal in the slightest.
Maybe there was no meaning to the universe, and nothing after death, and no one driving the metaphorical bus from up above.
Butch fished through damp cashmere to grip the heavy gold cross hanging from his neck. His Catholic faith told him otherwise, but what the fuck did he know.
And on a night like tonight, he wasn’t sure what was worse. The idea that he was responsible for ending the war.
Or the possibility that he wasn’t.
Putting his hand on V’s shoulder, Butch moved down the heavily muscled arm until he clasped the thick wrist above the glowing curse. Then he stepped in beside his brother and lifted that deadly palm, the leather of V’s jacket sleeve creaking.
“Time for cleanup,” Butch said hoarsely.
“Yes,” V agreed. “It is.”
As Butch held up the arm, energy unleashed from the palm in a great burst of light, the illumination blinding him, his eyes stinging, though he refused to look away from the power, the terrible grace, the universe’s mystery of origin that was inexplicably housed within the otherwise unremarkable flesh of his best friend.
Under the onslaught, all traces of the Omega’s evil work disappeared, the structure of the maintenance building, its comparably fragile walls and floor and rafters of the roof, remaining untouched by the fearsome glory that reclaimed the humble space that been horribly used for as evil a purpose as ever there was.
What if the Prophecy itself is not enough, Butch thought to himself.
After all, mortals weren’t the only things that had a shelf life. History likewise decayed and was lost, over time. Lessons forgotten . . . rules mislaid . . . heroes dead and gone . . .
Prophecies dismissed when another future comes along to claim the present as its victim, proving that that which had been taken as an absolute was in fact only a partial truth.
Everyone was talking about the end of the war, but