Alone Together

Alone Together

We were both imbibed by liquor and bitterness when she told me, between making out and groping at each other, that she knew that someday all the world would be mine. She said it with a slight slur and a giggle and a sigh, but I could feel the seriousness of her statement. At the time, her words did not seem anymore important or cryptic than anything else we'd usually tell each other and we continued our activities without much care or concern about the estate of our futures. After we were done I snuck away out of the house into the dim streets under the ebony sky and brooded over many things.

When I got home I was alone again and slept uneasily with distressing dreams. Dreams of scarlet skies and tall ivory, winged men singing in deep voices with a strange tongue. They were angels, I thought at first, but they were horrible in a way. Their hands and heads were worn down so that the skeleton was visible, making them at once beautiful and unsettling to behold. I could not understand them but they all seemed to acknowledge me and, I imagined, did so with great reverence. They motioned to me with their bony fingers to something I could not see in the far west.

When I woke the dream had been forgotten for the time and I left the chill and shade of my house and met up with her again. It was still dark, of course, it was always dark anymore and the people of our small town rarely came out of their homes at all, fearing the darkness as a sign of a false god's doom. But I was not afraid and what was more, I had only her to console me and it did me good to see her face, pale and unreadable in the ill-lit street. She didn't ask me why I had left her as she slept the night before, she knew about the dreams and the moods that would overcome me sometimes to flee from all those around me and delve into the melancholy places of my mind.

We walked the grey, cracked streets alone together, our footsteps sounding off the concrete in a kind of faint and dreary music, offbeat and loud in the silence. The town was as if deserted nowadays, its citizens having left, died, or barricaded themselves from the world. It was now ours and we were not at all offended by taking what we desired of ourselves from various stores and residences and moving on our way to places where others like us dwelled. We cared little for these old friends anymore, they had become shells of what they had once been and their homes were simply our havens from when the emptiness of the streets turned against our favor and made us feel strange and gloomy. There among our woebegotten companions we would sit on dirty cushions and listen as one of the sadder ones told stories of yesterdays, when the world was bright in both the figurative and literal sense of the word and we were all content.

The smoke of many cigarettes would fill the rooms and enshroud us in billowed white clouds, obscuring our vision from the outside. We rarely left the confines of the houses, except to go and get supplies or to move on to a new house while the one we'd been in was left to purify itself. The kid with the darker skin and the long hair who was the best of my friends sometimes made us laugh, made us feel a little whole again, or he would sing sorrowfully and our souls would die a little more, but with a kind of peace. The sex addict would bring girls and the boys would fill their emptiness in indulging baser desires and the girls would end up just a little bit more unwoven.

Sometimes the two of us would wake up to the awful reality of the scenes played out before us and we would risk the terrors of the outside, walking down the cold streets, just to escape the spiral of pitiful degeneration that occured within the others. We would find abandoned houses sometimes and make love in the darkness just to prove to ourselves that there was still passion and connection in the world. Other times the moods would come upon me again and I would be forced to leave her to return to the others while I went mad for a few brief hours.

I hardly ever went home. Home was the emptiest place of all, where the residue of past events stained the walls and made a stink in the house that stung the nostrils. My mother and father weren't there, they had left, one by driving away, the other by dying. My mother had died in the first days of the strange sickness which blossomed just before the darkness came. First she had been turned delusional and angry and then she had become weak and her skin had seemed to char, like some inner fire was finally working its way to the surface. She'd died cursing the world; bitter, raging, and alone. My father left the next day, taking just enough time to bury her and pack up. He gave me the choice to go with him, but I didn't want to go with him, so he left alone and I think he was glad for that. The day he left was the last time the sun came up.

After a little more than a month of the darkness had gone by, the kid with the darker skin and long hair who was the best of my friends was killed by an enemy who hated him for once sleeping with his ex-girlfriend and I wept when the others told us. I wanted to kill the one who killed him but that guy ended up shooting himself two days later when he learned he had acquired the sickness.

She was there for me, held me, whispered healing words to me, but there was still a place in me she could not reach. We buried my friend the day his killer killed himself and, on a large stone we used as a marker, I wrote in red paint; "Here Lies The One Who Kept Our Souls Alive". And I wrote his name and then after, that name was lost to me. The others began to talk less of the old days or of anything at all. They would just sit clustered together in the dimness of the rooms and they would be still as the world seemed to close in around them.

After that she would sometimes talk with me about leaving the town, heading for somewhere different, a place that was still beautiful in such a decaying world. And sometimes, when she spoke about the places we could go, the things we could do, I imagined them as she spoke of them and I would cherish the idea of the two of us traveling the decrepid lands alone together. But I suppose I was the more realistic of the two of us and I did not believe we would ever leave, save by being made to by someone else, perhaps an authority figure. We didn't know then that there was no more authority, that the nation, the whole world even, had crumbled into anarchy after the bizarre effects of the sickness and the darkness. And as for a beautiful place...well, I no longer believed in those.

It wasn't more than two months after my friend whose name I have since forgotten died that I found out she cried at night. I had been sleeping alone more and more frequently, isolating myself in the quiet dead hours, torturing myself with the dreams of the scarlet skies and skeleton-angels. But the dreams were different now. Now the decaying seraphs fluttered ceremoniously through ruins and in the center of their long and solemn line was a raised and carried dais on which lied a veiled man in grey and red cloth. I felt immediately that this must be their master. Though I assumed him to be in slumber, I could see his eyes were open and wholly black, peering through slits in the cloth that he wore upon his face. I do not know why, but this being disturbed me more than all else.

Sometimes in my dreams the garbled chanting of the rotting angels would make sense and I would hear the same phrase said over and over again; "He wakes in death, he wakes in death, he wakes in death..."

When I woke the dreams disappeared from me again and I would be lost once more as to what frightened me so much. It was after one of these sudden awakenings that I discovered her secret sadness. Roused into the dead dark hours I crawled out from the hidden place in the corner behind the couch where I often slept in the house we were dwelling in and made my way upstairs where I knew she was sleeping. But as I reached the head of the stairs I heard faint sobs and standing outside her bedroom door I could hear her crying. I wanted to ease her pain and so entered the room but found to my surprise that she was not stirred and upset but asleep and the crying was a result of what must have been most dreadful nightmares. I sat near her in an old arm chair the rest of that night, listening to her and resting only when she herself was sound asleep, her dark dreams passed.

When I asked her about it two nights later, it having taken me that long to build up the courage to question her, she she told me she could not remember what plagued her so in her sleep. It was at this time I wondered if we shared the same moods I so long thought were mine alone. Of this I told her nothing, for if it were true I wanted to deny it, the moods being that unpleasant to me that I wished not to acknowledge them in her.

Time slimed its way through the ever-nights and little changed for another month. Then the small amoeba collection of friends we had came together to conclude that they wanted to leave. As she and I had once imagined, they wanted to see if there might be some clandestine paradise where all wounds would heal and all ails would soothe, mental, emotional, and physical alike. She and I were of ripe age, though not the eldest in the group and we silently understood that we should follow along, if only for our survival and so as not to be left in the half-dead town.

The others began packing away things; little items of value, large furniture for basic comfort, and food stocks to live on. Five days passed and then we were ready to leave. There was eleven of us in all and we would have a van and a car. Those of us not in one of these would transport the packaged things in a small hauling truck. The plan was to drive until we reached the next state's capital, then unload the vehicles, rest, look for any other wishful survivors, repeat if necessary. We were headed west. Someone came up with the funny idea to begin learning to fly a plane, then we could go international. I think it was just an idea, though.

We left and on the first day there was a strange and wonderful kind of renewal in everyone. For the first time in a long while it seemed, there was laughter. We talked and joked and sang out of tune to our music just like in the old days before the sickness and the darkness and it was good to feel like that again. She and I were close to one another in the far back of the van, snuggled together under someone's blanket, quietly kissing and touching underneath it. She was so happy and her eyes had a shine of life in them again like they'd had long ago. It made me think that maybe there could be a beautiful place still left in the world, and even if there wasn't really, there was in a way and it was in her eyes.

We took shifts driving and sleeping, switching when we stopped to get gas or use the bathroom or just to stretch. We weren't in any real hurry. The world was as good as over, so we figured there was no rush. The skies over the highways were as dark as ever, ominous and empty and making one think that the old blue skies had been torn away so that the horrible and lonesome nature of existence could be witnessed by all. Whenever I caught her looking up towards the darkness I saw that shine in her eyes shy away and I could see the fear that was underneath. Then I would nudge her back into reality, away from the ominpresent void, and kiss her and hold her closer.

We stopped once on our way to the next state's capitial to check on the things we'd packed away and to fix the van, which had started acting oddly. While the others all tinkered with the innerworkings of the van, looked over the packed up items or just stood around in the middle of the desolate highway, smoking and feeling the strangeness of the silence and inactivity, the two of us lied next to each other in the back. She had her head on my shoulder and we were both quiet and melancholy. She looked up at me as I stared out the window at nothing in particular and kissed my cheek and spoke.

"Do you think we'll find a beautiful place?" she asked with her sweet and vunerable voice.

I did not know how to reply. I was still skeptical that anything was going to work out, the best I hoped for was a new place, perhaps with something to rekindle the group's dying interest in life. I did not think we could find paradise.

I told her that if she was there, it would be beautiful. I said it truthfully even though I was evading giving her a real answer.

"What'll you do when it's all yours?" she asked me with a curious look.

Again I was at a loss of words. I asked her what she meant by 'all mine'.

She told me then that she had been having two kinds of dreams; ones that brought her much fear which she could never remember upon waking, and ones in which I had inherited the world and was, with her, making it a heaven on earth. I told her they were only dreams.

"Only if we let them be," she replied.

There was more to be said but the others began to come back then and she would speak of it no more. I felt her fall asleep beside me as we continued down the highway again and all I could do was uneasily stare out at the passing night as it blurred right by.

We arrived at the next state's capital the following evening, judging this solely by our watches because time meant nothing to the darkness, it was eternal. The city was vast and tall and as dead as the town we'd come from and the towns we'd passed through. Everywhere I could feel the ghosts of forgotten lives and moments of happiness and safety which were now lost and consumed by the uncaring sickness.

Most places were rundown and hushed, but everynow and then an unspeakable horror would be right in plain sight as we passed, the dead lying on the sidewalks, in the road, in stores, and on porches. It looked like the sickness had come upon them so suddenly, attacking them as they went about their oblivious lives and burning them up like candle wicks. And still other times we saw death that had come not by the sickness, but by neurotic, frightened violence. More than one of us sobbed and one girl even threw up out onto the street.

We never saw anyone alive. It made me feel out of place to be breathing in such a lifeless city. It made me wonder why the eleven of us were still alive when it seemed like the rest of the world was lying cold and stiff in the gutter. I didn't like thinking about that, because everytime I did I got the foreboding feeling that it wasn't a blessing we weren't dead too.

Everyone was grave again with the sights of the city, woken up from the happy dream of the road trip. The energy we'd had slowly seeped out of us and when we came to the city square we were tired and the others longed for the solace of sleep. I feared its embrace, however. I was afraid to dream, I was afraid that perhaps the night's slumber would never end and the city would have eleven more souls to digest and send to the ruinous zombie-walk of Tartarus. But the Sandman came upon me too and soon I fell down into myself and slept.

Sometime later I awoke, having had no dreams. Somehow that was more disturbing than having them and not remembering them. What did it mean? Had my awful visions and moods left me finally, was I free? Or was there no longer a need for them, was I now within the horror of them for real? The black nothingness of my unconscious mind had unsettled me and I feared that death would be as such.

I looked over to her to see she slept peacefully, no doubt the dreams of our beautifying the world swimming through her head. I smiled at her blissful disconnection and kissed her forehead, careful not to break sleep's spell. For her and the others it was escape, but for me there was nowhere to run for comfort, both the sleeping and waking worlds moved for my destruction.

I quietly opened one of the van's back doors and slid out into the city night-morning. The moods were upon me, I knew, and I had to walk among the dead and silence to satiate the growing distress inside. I took out a cigarette and lit it and began walking down the dark road away from the square and towards the empty standing buildings. I looked up to see a looming skyscraper, some type of office building, and for reasons I could not decipher, felt urged to travel to the top of it so that I might look down at the city.

I entered the building through broken glass doors and passed the lobby when I saw the charred corpse of some drone of the company that had run the building, half of his body lying face-down in a still working fountain. Little bits of his crusting skin floated in the water and the smell of him reminded me of burnt hamburgers on a grill and garbage hot under a summer sun. I held my nose and moved to the elevators. There were more bodies there, lying all intertwined like they had scrambled to escape each others' illness. I then found the stairway and decided it was the better option.

The stairway was tall and seemingly endless, dusty from lack of cleaning and hospital-white. I walked up the many steps, smoking my cigarettes one after the other, feeling like I was some mythological hero ascending the mountain to face the monster or speak to the wise man or whatever that waited at the top. It was not long before paranoia and loneliness came to me and every so often I would get the feeling that someone or something was following close behind me. I did not look back, however, because although the presence disturbed me, the thought of sending it away and continuing on alone was worse.

Up and up I walked until at last, after unknown minutes, hours, days, after what might have been the span of ten universes bursting to life and collapsing back upon themselves, I reached the top. I was not all too surprised to find the door was ajar, looking recently forced open. Unscathed, I opened it further and stepped out and up onto the roof of the building.

Standing by the edge, looking out onto the city, was one of the other ten, the sex addict whom so often joked and distracted himself and the others with carnalities and the lust of youth. I did not expect him of all of them to have felt the same urge as I. I came up behind him slowly and he turned to look at me.

"Hey, man," he said in a calm, detached sort of way.

I greeted him in return, offering him a cigarette. He took it with gratitude and lit it up.

"I smoked all mine," he said, then paused. "I think I'm gonna give 'em up," he added. "I mean, I know it's kinda pointless to, you know? What, with the end of the world or whatever happening. But...I don't know...I just feel like giving 'em up."

I told him that was a wise decision. Just because the world was dead didn't mean we had to act that way.

"And it's not just cigarettes, either," he continued. "I mean all of it. The drugs, the booze...even the girls." He laughed at that. "Yeah, man, even the girls. I guess...I guess maybe I wanna try to do something else with myself, not just waste my time away fucking chick after chick." He was quiet for a moment and then began again with hesitance. "I think...I think maybe I've found God."

I smiled and gave him a pat on the back. That was good, I told him. And if he had, I said, could he please steer me in His direction? We laughed at that. I didn't believe in God, but was happy he had decided to change, happy he had found some kind of sense of security. All I wanted for the others was for them to feel safe and content.

The two of us said nothing for a long while, wordlessly smoking our cigarettes and gazing out at the immortal night and death of the city. Then he began to weep. I turned to him to see the pain and fear flowing out of him.

"Just look at it, man. Look at it!"

I looked out again at the absolute tragedy that was the city. Everything was small and worthless and grey from the rooftop, exactly how I and all of us felt inside, and in the distance the world seemed to decay right before my eyes. I began to cry a little too, but I was too far gone into numbness to weep.

"There's no hope, is there?" he asked no one really through his tears and his gasping. "There's fucking nothing anymore. We're...we're alone. The whole world's just fading away and we've been forgotten..."

I said nothing as I could not make him feel any better because what he said was what I believed to be true.

"I fucking hate this...I hate this..." he cried, his head in his hands. "Why did this happen?...Why the fuck did this happen?!" he yelled out to the dark sky, his voice sounding flat and unechoing. Even our pleas were deadened. There was no way to reach out for someone to save us.

The sex addict, now turned believer, grew quiet after another minute. "I meant it, though," he said with a rasp, "when I said I found God. I've figured it all out. He's there, man, waiting for us. But all the shit that's happened, the sickness, the darkness, it's hiding us from Him. He can't find us. There's only one way to get back to Him, only one way to get out of all of this. I've figured it all out..."

The sex addict, now turned believer, turned to me and squeezed my shoulder, giving me a look that was both sad and happy, empty and fulfilled.

"The rest of 'em are gonna die, man. She'll be the only one left," he said prophetically.

Then he fell back and his body dropped down off the edge of the rooftop towards the city street below. I moved to catch him but was too late and could only watch as he fell silently with a smile on his face. I turned away before he hit ground.

When I came back down and out of the building I kept my eyes closed until I felt sure I was away from it and the body. I was out of cigarettes and I felt more empty than I ever had before. I didn't believe in God, but if I had I would've blasphemed His name one million times for all the woe and misery He had bequeathed upon humanity.

I walked back to the van and the car and the hauling truck to find the others awake and eating breakfast. They asked where I had been and if I knew where the sex addict was. I told them I didn't know. She looked at me and I could tell she knew I was lying, but she said nothing. I went to her and kissed her and held her and she gave me some food to eat but I said I wasn't hungry. I looked at the others, remembering the sex addict who had turned believer's words and wondered which one of them would get it first. I looked to one of them, the burly intellectual friend of mine, and I knew it would be him the sickness would take next. Then after I could see it would be the other young couple of the group, whom so reminded me of her and myself, to get it. Before my eyes the mark of death appeared on each one of them. And more than one of the deaths, I saw, would not be due to the sickness. One of them would break down and start killing, thinking they were saving the others as well as themself.

I put my mouth to her ear and whispered that we would have to leave that night. She asked me why and I told her that by the next day they would all be dead. She looked at me with fear and sorrow but she knew I was telling the truth. She swallowed her desire to cry and nodded. Then the two of us watched our friends as they talked and sat close together, apparently a little happier now and more at ease.

By evening the sickness was visible in my burly intellectual friend and everyone was frantic with despair and indecision. She and I took this time to slip away with two bags of supplies we'd put together over the course of the afternoon. When we left I could see one of the others had taken out their gun and hid it under their jacket. No one noticed us as we took our leave, they were lost in remorse and growing anger, both at the situation and, because the sickness was already spreading, each other.

We went far away from the city square, passing the looming and shadowy buildings and the splayed and grotesque bodies to the outskirts of the city where we found some empty apartment. That night I thought I could hear the screams of my friends as they watched their skin singe and the shots from the gun one of them used on the ones too far turned. But perhaps I had imagined it. She and I tried to make love to shut out the things we knew were going on outside but all we could do was hold each other in the dark and cry. Fatigue overwhelmed us in our sadness and we could not fight sleep's wicked clasp.

The next few days passed by in a fog of empty emotions and gloomy depression. We both felt something was coming, a final maudlin act to this apocalyptic matinee. The sky seemed to get darker and the city seemed to at once close in around us and grow larger than ever. We were lost little things in a tiny big city of the dead. The blackness of my subconscious tortured me more and more, so much like death as I imagined it must be that I almost wanted the horrible unrememberable dreams back.

One night, about two weeks after we'd left our friends to die, I lied half-awake trying not to fade into the thoughtless deathlike sleep. She was beside me in the bed, dreaming, and her movements and moans told me it was one of the bad dreams, dreams that must have been like mine, she was having. I thought to myself that perhaps they had been my sickness but maybe I had gotten over them and passed them onto her to suffer them instead of me. This filled me with dread for I hated the idea of being the reason she slept so uneasily.

She rose suddenly and I thought she had woken from the twisted reveries and I moved to hold her but she was still within the dreamworld. In her sleep, she murmured.

"It's dark again...so dark," she whimpered. "It's always dark..."

She laid back down on the bed, fully asleep again and lost in her mind. I sat upright, staring out into the dark. Indeed it was everywhere, a smothering sea of oblivion, coming to eat away at us and send us spiraling and weeping into the nether and the nothingness. When at last I fell asleep I could not tell the difference from it and being awake and when I was aware again that scared me more than I had ever been.

In my sleep, a dream came to me again at last. In it the skeleton-angels stood in a large gathered circle around a raised slab of stone on which the dais sat with the veiled man in grey and red upon it. The veiled man still laid as if asleep but with his ebony eyes always wide open and staring.

Beside the dais stood a new and towering figure. This thing was like the ghoulish seraphs though his skin was intact and a dark red. He stood massively tall and broad with a suit of shining obsidian armor. His wings were huge in span and like a raven's but the palest white I had ever seen, tipped at the end of his feathers with what must have been blood. The eyes of this giant demonic angel burned a blazing amber, like twin suns inside his skull. He spoke to the crowd of gangly skeleton-angels in a deep voice. I could now understand the tongue of these beings without any trouble.

"The Great Emperor of the Beneath sleeps but is nigh his death and waking. All that is left is for his Heart to be sacrificed unto himself so that his world may fully darken. The sweeping pestilence that cures all shall at last take hold of the final obstruction between him and his eternal reign."

After these words were spoken the crowd of skeleton-angels cheered with high and screeching voices they had not had before. Again they pointed west, to where I watched as a dark sun rose. Here the dream faded and I was trapped within my death-sleep again.

In the morning I stirred and looked beside me to see she was not there. I looked to the bathroom to see the door closed and the lights on inside, peeking out through the crack at the bottom. I went to the door and knocked, recieving no answer. I knocked again and called out to her, asking if she was alright. I did not know why, but I felt something was wrong. I put my ear to the door and inside I heard her crying and groaning in what I thought to be great pain. I ran my body into the door and it burst open, frightening her. I saw her lying in her underwear in the tub, water up passed the brim and pouring onto the tiled floor. I knelt down to her and put my arms around her but she quickly pushed me away. It was then I noticed the telltale black tinge and flaking of her skin.

"Don't touch me...you'll get it, too..." she said between sobbing and being overcome with agony.

I sat on the wet floor, horrified at the sight of her change. All along her body the sickness was forming, taking her away from me. Some of the very charred places had fallen away and were floating around her and in these places I could see the raw bleeding skin underneath.

I asked her, how could this happen?

"I must have caught it...yesterday morning...when it wasn't noticeable...in anybody yet..." she managed to gasp out. Then she cried harder. "Oh, god...I don't want to die..."

I asked her how long she'd been like this.

"Since sometime last night...I've...been in here for...hours. It's happening...so fast. It just keeps getting worse..."

I tried to hold her again but she struggled away from me, some of her skin peeling off from the quick movement.

"No!" she croaked. "I don't want you...to die, too. You have to stay alive...you have to make it...better..."

I told her I didn't want to live without her.

"You have to make it better," she repeated. Something about how her eyes looked at me made me think she was already gone, dreaming while awake. She slumped onto the side of the tub and for a terrible moment I thought she was dead, but after seeing the slow rise and fall of her chest, I knew she had only passed out from the strain of our conversation.

I sat beside the tub for a long time as she slept and my sight never wandered from her. After some unknown time had passed, perhaps even the entire day, she seemed to rouse. By now I myself was stressed into weariness and had been imagining things, thinking the strange thoughts of the sleep-deprived. She opened her eyes and looked up at me and yet she wasn't really looking at me. She was staring at something in her mind's eye, half-lost in dream.

"Who's that behind there?" she asked no one. She reached out to touch my face and moved her hand up as if she was removing something. Then her eyes focused onto me for real and she was lucid for a moment.

"Oh," she said with a smile that cracked the skin on her face, "it's you. I told you it'd be you..."

Then her arm went down into the water and her eyes lost the shine only she had and I knew she had died. I held her in my arms for hours despite the false threat of sickness, and wept deep and lonely. I didn't care about the sickness getting me, somehow I knew it couldn't, but I wished it would. I wished I could die with her and then we would just be two dead lovers in a forgotten bathtub, alone together. But I knew that I could not just die, not just by lying there. So I stood reluctantly and left her in the water with the debris of her ruined skin floating around her.

I walked a zombie-walk for what felt like more time than even forever must be, the last of the living in the city. Perhaps, I thought, I was the last of the living in the world.

I came to the city square at last and saw the scattered corpses that had been my old friends lying there. Six of them had been shot, all of them had the look of the sickness upon them. Amongst them I found the gun in one of their hands. I held it in my own and looked out at the city, it seemed to be on the verge of collapsing down around me. Then, hoping like I had never hoped before that there was at least one more bullet, I put the gun just under my chin and blew my brains out.

In what might have been a dream or something more, I saw the crowd of skeleton-angels still cheering under the scarlet sky and the dark sun. The giant demon-angel stood by the dais and on it was the veiled man. Beside his dais was one like it, where lied the beautiful and sleeping figure of her, my beloved. She was adorned in gowns of white and black, the twin colors of death.

I walked through the crowd of rotting seraphs, who parted as I neared, and came to the raised slab of stone. Here the giant demon-angel greeted me and bowed. As I stood upon the slab, the veiled man rose from his slumber and looked to me with his eyes so dark. Silently he came before me and nodded. Then, pulling away the cloth that he wore upon his face, I saw his visage was my own. This was no surprise to me, it was simply what was. He faced the crowd and I turned to look at them as well. As I turned I felt the change and he and I became one.

Then I looked back to her, my sacrificed Heart, and saw her awaken. She looked up at me with a loving smile then rose and came to stand beside me.

"The Great Emperor of the Beneath has woken in death at last," the demon-angel spoke. "Now the world is his..."

"Now the world is yours," she echoed in my ear.

"No," I said. "It is ours. To make over again. To make beautiful."

And forevermore we were rulers of our new and beautiful world, alone together.