[your heart was a legend]
The dark, thick clouds looked like rain.
Julia had always loved the rain and the promises of the things it brought, at least for a while. When it rained it seemed exciting, something was going on, something new and different. In a few moments time, the world would be washed clean and there would be the smallest of new starts. Julia valued the idea of new starts but no longer the rain. It was understandable ... both times Julia had died it had been raining.
She was a dead woman walking from the moment she’d saved Spike and crushed him at the same time. She was a dead woman walking in more ways than one. In one, the more practical sense, she was going to die. Spike wasn’t going to kill her, and she knew that. She knew he was still out there looking for her. But the moment the other part of her past caught up with her, the past in suits and smelling of gun smoke and cigarette smoke, she was dead.
Vicious didn’t care that they’d been technically in love once. Julia loved Vicious. She didn’t know what Vicious loved. Probably nothing. All those times they’d slept together (and that was the only evidence of their relationship she could think of), all those times she’d looked into his eyes and thought she’d seen a different look than he gave everyone else. All those things that were romantic when linked with Vicious, he wouldn’t care.
You cross the Syndicate, you cross Vicious, you cross lines, you die.
She didn’t know how soon it would be.
Until the next day after she’d left, crying in a slow-moving elevator in a building that was all but abandoned (so it really didn’t matter if she left herself go), she realized the weight of everything she’d done. She leaned against the cold metal of the lift and cried. It was cleansing, and not at all weak, in the way she’d considered shedding tears before. It had the promise of new things.
She couldn’t go back to her old apartment, even to collect her things, and this new place was just somewhere to sleep, alone. Alone and without Vicious, and without Spike, and without herself, really.
Ever since the next day, the day after the day after she’d left, the new day after all the rains, life took different meanings. She didn’t know what she believed in before, and that was typical. Before she started running around with the boys, she hadn’t really lived. In fact, she didn’t live then until she looked into those bizarre eyes of Spike’s and knew things wouldn’t be the same.
Different meanings. She noticed, against her will, things like the aesthetics of birds in trees, many birds and how the cracked moon became brighter when the sun grew dimmer when watched from a window on Earth. Little things that didn’t connect, weight and change.
She supposed it stemmed from her knowledge of this being the last days. People did things like that, didn’t they? They breathed for the first time when they drew their last.
Thunder rumbled low somewhere, she didn’t count it and she gripped the steering wheel, pushing the car faster.
She was a dead woman walking and twice. Ever since that day it was raining, the last rain she remembered, she’d been dead.
But inside and that seemed so absurdly poetic, but it resounded against the different meanings brought upon by her impending physical death. She’d see the birds, she’d see the broken moon and she’d think, and what of it?
What was the good of suddenly feeling, but small things like a sweater against your elbow if it was suddenly cancelled by the thoughts of none of it, none of it, mattering?
She couldn’t say she was a simple woman, no matter how much she’d tried to be. No matter how much she tried to find pleasures in the simple things, even Before, it didn’t work. Somehow, she was destined to be this. Whatever this was, she’d ask Spike. It seemed in many ways he’d created her.
Julia wanted to think that was romantic, but it pissed her off, in the tiniest defensive way.
Spike had loved her.
Spike had only made her a myth.
She assumed, in the most negligible way, that deep down she really was simple and it was wrapped up in things men made her. That inversely she was all along what she suspected.
Every time it rained, even now, she would wonder, what will happen after this clears?
She was on Mars when the first drops started to fall for the last time, somewhere nearing a completely unnecessary tollbooth in the wilds outside the city.
She wondered what she looked like now, blonde hair tousled from driving with the hood down, eyes covered in shades, a unlit smoke between her dark lips.
It was inevitable along the road, the tollbooth was, and she tried to pull out a bit of money before she reached it, when she heard a rumble again, louder somewhere in the distance and didn’t notice the gate had gone down in front of her car.
“Hey, baby,” said the man.
She fished in her purse, past some cheap smokes that weren’t her brand but she smoked anyway. Her hand brushed keys, red lipstick, and a tin of orange candies she’d bought from a street urchin last time she was on Earth. She wasn’t the type to pity the homeless in general, but the kid had looked so lost and was selling them for the smallest amount of Woolongs possible before it was almost criminal. She had that much in her tight back pockets. At least the candies took up space.
Before, she usually only needed coat pockets but ever since she’d started carrying a gun she’d needed a handbag. It only seemed right, the lady gangster with a gun in the same place she kept her sunglasses. There was something oddly romantic yet practical about the idea. Her kind of idea, nowadays.
She found the right amount of money and handed it to the man and a few drops of rain fell on her head as he gave her change. Otherwise, she’d be going so fast she wouldn’t feel it.
What she knew but not for certain, was that it had begun to rumble and rain in more places than here, but right now.