Gabriel
It started small, like the tail end of an argument you think you remember but only recall the tone of, Vivi pacing in the living room, her hair loose over her back and shoulders, the sunlight through the window caught on the silver of her watch.
She was scolding me, not angry, not the sharp, hateful kind, but that steady, practical scold that always carried the weight of love.
The kind that meant, oddly, "I'm telling you this because I believe you'll listen." I'd been doing the only thing I know how to do when I feel useless: working harder until I break the clock, stuffing my stomach full of nothing because I'd forgotten to eat, inventing reasons to push myself so I could somehow be the equal of the woman who carried our house in her hands and still fed me my courage.
"You don't have to be the breadwinner, babe," she said, and it sounded like a reproach because in my head, being the man meant keeping score. "You don't have to prove anything to me." She crossed her arms, and I felt a child's stubbornness rise in me, the old ridiculous belief that if I couldn't out-succeed her, I somehow failed at being my best. She said, "Let me carry you sometimes," and I heard the pity in her voice, and it struck me more than any insult.
So I walked out. I remember the cold evening, the sky wanted to remind me winter existed, and I stood on the stoop and told myself I'd clear my head, that I'd earn the right to come back with answers. I walked too long and my stomach complained louder than my pride. The hunger made me small, like the edges of the world had curled in. I felt my pockets and that's when I realized I didn't bring my wallet. After thinking and thinking and being ashamed of thinking, I came back.
I opened the door, and the living room was warm, the way it always was when she was alone, cozy, measured, no unnecessary shadows. She was on the couch, the soft throw gone slightly sideways, a single plate in her hand; on it a spongy, cream-filled cake that looked almost comically out of place next to her sensible paperwork. I always thought of her as elegant enough to have strange tastes; tonight it was a Twinkie-like thing, pale and ridiculous. She looked up at me and made that face she makes when she wants to be stern but is a heartbeat away from laughing.
"I'm sorry… for—"
"Come here," she interrupted
I paused at the threshold like a man waiting to be judged. The thing about Vivi was that she never set tests; she set comfort. I crossed the room. "Get down," she told me. I knelt on the rug in front of her. She motioned again, softer. I assumed she meant lower; I went slowly, and when she said it again, she meant to lie down, completely, on the ground.
I lay there and tried to read her eyes. She straddled me like she owned the moment, which of course she did. She planted both warm hands on my cheek with a firmness that was almost corrective, and when she forced open my mouth, I hated her for a second; I hated the ease with which she could make me comply, but I loved her for the same thing
"It's disrespectful to walk out on others…" She reached for the cake on the plate and bit off a portion of her snack, then, with a smirk that had been honed over years of mock punishments, she shoved the remaining part into my mouth. "Chew," she said while closing my jaw, stern, like a child lecturing a wayward pupil. I obeyed.
I chewed, feeling embarrassed like a man taking medicine; I was too shy to look her in the eyes. The sponge was sweet and too soft, a little too much like everything else she made easily. Warm bread, steady hands, the mood she wrapped around the house
She softened, impossibly, and started to talk, not about my health, not about work, but about the ridiculousness of my being angry when I had dinner waiting at home. "You don't have to catch up, Gabriel," she said. "You don't have to match me. I married you for your soul and your heart and your kindness. I married you because you made me laugh the night your apartment flooded and you tried to rescue a potted fern with a bucket." Her tone was full of those small, private jokes that were weapons only she could wield.
A strange ache tightened my chest. I started to answer, to make one of my customary defensible speeches, "I want to be enough," I began, but she put a finger to my lip and the room stilled. She stroked the three mole-dots that trailed along my face down to my chin with the kind of attention people save for old friends and wounds.
"I think I'd do well as your mother," she said suddenly. The words startled me because they weren't in my script. "I want to make you feel taken care of. You are my boywife, and I will not have you starving like some stubborn poet."
I laughed, but it came out thin. "Boywife?" I said. It landed between us like a toy.
"You know you are," she said, and the sternness rolled away. "Stay, my boywife. Stay here. Stay ridiculous and messy and perfect."
She talked then of a dream I had no right to keep, a house with a long porch somewhere that smelled of flowers in late summer and not of smoke or sulfur. She pictured a table so long we'd need a flag at the end to call people in. A home we could share with every one of our best friends and future friends together. I listened like a man who'd lost road maps forever: this was the country house she pictured for us, and it was ridiculous and faint and calming all at once. My throat tightened because the picture was more real to me than the pages of my life had been.
Something in her voice, the kind that told me everything I needed without lecturing, made me think I could stop sprinting. For a second, I believed I could be small and safe and enough. I tried to answer, to tell her not to carry me so much, but instead a flicker of something else cut the scene. A memory intruded, uninvited, like a film strip thrown over the projector.
I saw her on the floor. Not this Vivi, not the one with the patient hands feeding me sponge cake, but a broken shape in the snow, limbs arranged wrong, blood not red but dark and wrong. Iris's little body was lying like paper under her. My stomach folded in. The room tilted and I realized, because dreams are treacherous and sometimes merciful, that this was the past, a dream that the lady who was sitting on me could not be her but her soul. The twist in my ribs was grief and guilt pretending to be reality.
I grabbed her then, desperate, and flipped us so my chest was over hers, my face buried where the softness of her unbuttoned shirt already knew the pattern of my tears. My hands squeezed at her chest, and the dream answered with the small, steady motions it had always given me: Her hand threaded in my hair, the same fingers that had been stern seconds earlier now doing a holy ridiculous thing, stroking, soothing. She murmured, "It's not your fault," and the words dangled like lifelines.
"No," I choked. That one syllable held everything. "I should have stayed. I should have been the one who died." The fantasy of death had always been mine in private; better to be the one who took the pain than the one who inflicted it by surviving. In my head, I kept running the equation as if the universe had a ledger book and my survival was a debt I could never pay.
She pressed closer and whispered, in the language of people who live to bruise but mend, "Live. Please. Live, because I love you, because Iris loves you. Because I'm tired of you hurting yourself like it's a hobby."
The dream shifted again. Summer. Wind through the park, the air was thick with something that felt like normal life. Pigeons, a mother with a stroller, a man walking a dog. The colors were too bright, the way memory brightens corners to keep them safe. Vivi was sitting next to me on the bench, her hands laced through mine as though we were the center of a tiny world. Iris, three years old and with all the bright hair, ran up with skinned knees and questions and a lopsided grin that belonged to us.
"Papa!" she shouted, arms wide, meaning the whole impossible news of the world in one explosive word. She leaped into my arms, and I picked her up. I felt the weight of her smallness settle into my grasp. Vivi laughed and said something beautiful about teaching Iris how to have fun. I felt my throat close, then a swelling and tightness that was gratitude and also a wound that never healed right. Iris cuddled my neck and, out of the clear blue of a child's reasoning, said, "I love you, papa!" There was a pause in the world then, like the air inhaling, because children say the truth before anyone teaches them politics. The phrase landed softer than any apology, and I cried with it. A sudden, ugly, unmanly sound of relief. I wanted forever in that moment. To be small enough to be loved, to be worthy enough to deserve it.
Then the ceiling changed. The park, the bench, the bright summer light, they all frayed like fabric, and the hospital's ceiling tiles pressed back into my eyes. I inhaled a breath that tasted like antiseptic and snow and the copper tang of a memory I'd been carrying for years.
I was awake.
I looked down at my hands, no bandages, no machinery, no crusted blood. The bruises that usually lived there, the ones that testify to a man who's slept in alleys and fought too long, are too gone. It took a breath and the smell of disinfectant to accept that the dream had ended and the world, brittle and indifferent, continued.
Elias sat in the chair to my left, head tilted downwards, wearing his jacket unzipped, the kind of jacket that had seen too many nights. It was dusted with snow that had melted into specks of damp. The white had gone sludgy at the shoulders as if he'd come straight from outside and never changed. He looked younger in sleep than he had the right to; the lines around his eyes softened by exhaustion. He should have been covered in wounds, or at least bandaged, but he was only tired. Or maybe tiredness is just a bruise you can't dress.
Relief flared up hot enough that I laughed once, a short bark that surprised me. For a second, I had the irrational hope that maybe everything would stitch itself back together, and that dream had been a rehearsal for waking up whole and having everything be as it had been that night before everything went wrong.
"Elias," I whispered. My voice scraped. He stirred, then opened his eyes and blinked slowly, like a man surfacing from the deep. The eyelids showed the map of someone who'd been outside for too long, red at the rims, caked with what might have been water, or tears. His lips twitched into a half-smile, tired and terrible and entirely brotherly.
"They told me you would be waking up soon," He said without malice. The way he said it made me realize how small our world had shrunk: We asked for permission to be ourselves now, the way the sailors asked the sea.
"Yeah," I said. And it was the truth, at least for the moment. I pushed myself up, the mattress making a small complaint, and the light of the hospital window was thin and honest. Elias smelled of smoke and snow and the sort of life you only smell when you've been trying to outrun grief.
He blinked and then, with that terrible, inevitable humility that belongs to old friends who have seen too much, he said, "You had me worried. We thought you—" He stopped. The sentence didn't need finishing; the space told the story.
I wanted to tell him everything at once, about getting trapped, about the dream where Vivi scolded me until I remembered how to be a child; Iris saying she loved me with the absolute uncompromising logic of toddlers and that it was enough; that grief still had teeth and sometimes fed me my own memory until i almost believed i'd been the one who'd failed.
Instead, I said the smaller truth. "I dreamed of them," I told him. "They were here."
He looked at me for a long moment with sad eyes, as if trying to decide whether to step into the dream with me or leave me alone with it. Then he shifted, tucking his chin. "Good," he said finally. "Keep dreaming. Keep holding them." His voice was rough and gentle at once. "We'll get you up on your feet."
He says it like a prayer, and then the room tilts back into silence. For a long time, we only have the rhythm of the hospital and the slow, jagged intake of my own breathing to mark that we both exist.
Then Elias starts to sob. It comes out small at first, a sound like a broken thing being pushed into place, then it grows until he's shaking in the plastic chair like a man made of something fragile. He doesn't hide it. He doesn't try to make it pretty for me. He grabs at his jacket and pulls it tight to his chest, as if the fabric could staunch blood and shame and the sound of the world collapsing. The snow melt smell is still there, damp and honest.
"I promised," he says between ragged breaths, and the single word pulls at me harder than anyone else. "I promised you. I promised them. I said— I said I would keep them safe."
His lips quiver. His eyes are raw and red and impossible. "I told Vivi, I told her, Elias—" he flinches, as if the name stings him now. "I told her I would be there. I would be the stupid, stubborn one. I'd take the hits. I'd be the fool who stood in the doorway. I said it like a joke, Gabe. I said it like one of my stupid lines, so it wouldn't be a real promise. But I meant it. I meant it."
He's not looking at me now. He's talking to the empty air of the hospital room, to the ceiling tiles and the humming fluorescent light. Memory sharpens on him: The promise we made in the training barracks, late nights, cheap beer washing down worse jokes. Two kids, both thinking they were braver than they were. "If either of us ever got somebody worth dying for," He'd said it once, grinning like a fool, "the other has to be first." We laughed then. It felt inevitable — an oath for the stupid and the brave.
He reaches the part he's been trying to drag out and swallows it down so hard I can see his Adam's apple working. "I couldn't stop him," he chokes. "I couldn't… I was too weak. I tried to slow him down… I tried to—" The sentence breaks like thin ice. He presses both his hands over his face, and the sound that comes after is small and human and unbearable.
I want, in that instant, to take the promise back for him and wear it instead. I want to tell him that promises are soft and stupid things that break under pressure, but that person who made them is not the ledger. I want to be sharp and fierce and fix everything with a single motion. I want to be alive in a way that keeps other people alive.
"You shouldn't say that," I tell him. My voice is rough and not as steady as I want. The hospital light makes half of his face look pale in the map of grief. " You can't say that it's like a thing you can tally. You did what you could."
He laughs, then a sound that is not really a laugh at all. "What I could do was hold on to a demon's leg while she was crawling away with one leg. That's what I could do instead of being stronger. I held onto an unstoppable one and begged like a coward for them to take me instead, the brute raised his fist and then she… she—"
The rest of the words dissolve into a sob. He says her name in the way people say prayer names when they are trying to be forgiven.
I reach out for him, clumsy because my arms forget their purpose on some days, and put my hand on his back. He jerks a little, like he didn't realize anyone would touch him, then slides down the chair so he is almost curled into himself. The chair creaks. He smells of smoke and snow and something bitter that might be shame.
"You didn't break a promise, Elias," I say. It comes from deep down, that tired place that knows what the heart will not accept and tries to offer an alternative. "Promises are for people who have a choice. The world took the choices away the moment it tipped. You were there. You were there when it mattered."
He lets out a ragged breath that is almost a laugh. "If being there saved them, say it. If being there mattered, say it." He looks at me finally, face wet, eyes enormous and accusing and small.
"It did," I say. I feel the truth of it like a stone falling into a still point. "You were there. You tried. You were more than a promise. You were in the mess with us. You didn't run."
"Gabriel—" I cut him off because the line has been laid too many ways between us already. "Stop blaming yourself." My hands find his shoulders, and I squeeze until his jaw works. "If anyone is to carry blame, it lies with the thing that did that to them, not you. We made a stupid promise once when we were kids. We meant it then. But when the storm comes, the only thing that matters is that you keep breathing. You kept fighting. That's not nothing."
He laughs again. Softer, and it sounds like a broken thing starting to mend. "You say that easily," he says, and the edge in it is flayed. "You weren't there watching them—" His voice stops. He cannot finish the sentence, and neither can I.
"I held them a little, Elias," I admit in a voice too small for the weight of it. "I thought I was dying. I thought if I did, it would be enough. I thought if I fell, they would be safe. It doesn't work like that." My throat closed. The confession has teeth. I taste iron. Saying it aloud makes the wound ache like the open sore it is.
He flinches and reaches out as if to steady me, and I let him. For a second, the hospital room is small and ridiculous and holy with two tired men holding each other because there is nothing else to hold. Outside the window, the snow is thinner than it was; someone has salted the sidewalk. Life keeps thinking it will be normal if you let it.
"Forgive me," he says finally, "Forgive me for being useless."
"You're not useless." I mean it with something like fierce devotion. "You are the kind of man who tries even when the world is trying not to let you. That's not useless."
Elias squeezes my hand back, hard. He breathes in, slowly, the way you teach someone to when panic has taken their throat. The sobs ease to hiccups. He looks at the window, then at me, and tries to make a joke, "Promise me you won't go dreaming of me being brave again, okay? I'm not ready to be heroic yet."
I almost laughed. It comes out in a hiccup and a wet sound, and we both gape at each other like children who have been told they can have one wish. The absurdity of the small joke, the attempt at normal, makes the room tilt and then right itself."
"I'll be alive," I say. It's a promise that is more for him than for me. "We will… We'll do something stupid and small and ordinary and live through it."
He tries to smile, and it comes crooked and bright like a cracked lantern. For a moment, we both pretend there is a future with small things in it, morning coffee, the awful song he loves, Vivi's stupid, perfect way of making a meal speak love. The grief sits beside the imagination like a long, patient guest.
When the nurse comes in to check and the door clicks and the corridor noises come closer, Elias wipes his face with the back of his hand and draws himself up, terrible and human. He looks at me with a raw honesty that leaves the room slick. "Keep dreaming of them," he says then, voice rough but steadier. "Tell me about their stupid little habits. Make me jealous. Make me believe in those mornings."
I do. I talk. Then I tell him the details I had in my dream, the way Vivi fed me cake like it was medicine, Iris's sudden love for calling me papa, and he listens with the face of someone learning how to breathe again. Outside, the world is still recovering and loud, but here we make a sanctuary out of words and memories and the clumsy covenant of two men who swore in youth and learned, in horror, how to keep each other alive.
Elias leaned back in the chair, watching me with that tired smile of his. "By the way… I brought you something. Figured you'd be hungry when you woke up."
He reached for a bag on the stand beside me. Inside was a takeout container, the cheap kind with the clear lid fogged over. My stomach, stubborn as it was, growled the moment he set it on the bed.
"It's just hot ham and cheese." He said, almost apologetic. "The corner shop near my place reopened early… a guy running it said he wanted to keep people fed, no matter what. Said closing his doors would've been worse for him than trying."
"Man," I gave a quiet laugh, even though my chest still ached when it did. "It's better than nothing."
He handed me the container, and the first bite was heavenly, even though it was greasy, lukewarm, and speckled with scraps of whatever vegetables they had left. I didn't care. It was something normal in the middle of all this hell.
For a while, we didn't talk. Just the sound of air conditioners and any other normal sounds you would hear in a hospital. Then Elias spoke, His tone different.
"Y'know… My leg was gone."
I froze mid-bite. "What?"
"Ripped clean off. From my thigh down. And everything on the right side of my chest? Crushed. My lung, my liver, my stomach… it was all pulp. I remember choking on blood. I knew I was finished. I felt it."
He said it so casually, but I could see the shadow in his eyes, the way his jaw clenched when he forced the words out.
"When I woke up, though…" He exhaled, almost shaking his head. "Both legs were there. Not even scars. And my chest? Perfect. No pain, no trouble breathing. Just… Like nothing happened."
I set the sandwich down, my appetite evaporating. "Maybe… A healer got to you, too.
He scoffed softly. "Healers like that? You know how rare they are. The few I've even heard about could barely patch someone up from half that. And even then, they'd need time. My injuries… I shouldn't have made it through the night."
The silence in the room pressed on me like a weight. I didn't know what to say, so I just set the container aside. Elias's eyes were glassy but focused, like he was forcing himself not to spiral.
Before I could continue, the door opened with a soft knock. A nurse stepped in, she gave us a practiced smile, her presence neat and professional but softened with kindness. Though I could see the weight pressing on her, too.
"Mr. Cain," She said, "good to see you awake. You're one of the lucky ones. Your body's completely fine, miraculous, really. You've just been resting for the past three days."
Three days. I'd been asleep for three days while the world burned.
She went through the usual motions: pulse, blood pressure, and a quick look at my reflexes. No machines, no tubes. Just her trained hands and a few handwritten notes. Scribbled something on a clipboard before telling me I was free to go once I was ready and left.
Elias looked at me, "Guess that's your cue." He gave me clothes I could wear instead of my torn, bloodstained ones. I changed out of the hospital gown and into them. When we stepped outside, the air hit me cold, metallic, like the city itself was still bleeding.
The city was quieter than it had any right to be. No cars honking. No chatter spilling from open shops. Just an uneasy silence carried by the wind.
As we walked, Elias broke the silence. "Vivi was right. It wasn't just here. It happened everywhere. Forty percent of the population… gone." His voice cracked slightly.
My stomach dropped. Forty percent. Almost half the world, 4 billion people, were erased in a single night.
I pulled out my phone, fingers trembling as I scrolled. Curfew notices plastered across every feed. Videos about streets torn apart, people screaming, shadows moving where they shouldn't exist. Someone had captured footage of horned figures walking through fire like kings.
A speech replayed across every news feed, the President's face pale but resolute. "This was not an isolated event. three days ago, on the 18th of December, humanity was attacked, not by any nation, but by something older, darker. We are standing at the edge of a new world. We mourn, but we endure. To our enemies, this war we have waged among ourselves is meaningless in the face of extinction. Effective immediately, a ceasefire is declared between the Allies and the Dominion. Our militaries will no longer fight each other, but protect our people. Humanity is not divided; we are one, not because we are weak, but because survival demands unity."
I frowned, bitterness rising in my chest. That war, whatever the reason it started, had chewed up countless lives and spat them out for nothing. It shouldn't have started in the first place. Hundreds of thousands dead for what? Borders and pride? And now it took this nightmare for them to suddenly remember people mattered more than borders. Too late for Iris, too late for Vivi.
Scrolling further, my stomach twisted.
"Demons," I whispered under my breath.
Elias glanced at me but said nothing.
The reports were everywhere now. Official statements, eyewitness accounts, shaky phone footage. Horned figures cutting through crowds while ignoring gunshots, their bodies burning away into nothing when slain by strong spiritual energy. Some… Shifted, their forms warping into monstrous shapes before returning to their normal forms. Which meant they could hide. Disguise themselves as us.
Detection protocols were already being drafted. Scientists and exorcists connected the dots: The mysterious burn marks and missing people found for years weren't strange accidents; they were just the remnants of demon kills, bodies burned away completely. Humanity had just been blind.
Relief groups were mobilizing, service organizations passing out food, water, and clothing. The world was awake now, shaken but moving. Forced to face what it had ignored for years. Burn marks, disappearances, unexplained tragedies, they weren't accidents. They were killings.
Beside me, Elias's voice pulled me out of my thoughts. "People are starting cenotaph ceremonies. Funerals without bodies. Burying the keepsakes instead: Clothes, Jewelry, toys, whatever they can find. Memorials for the ones who burned away. They're letting anyone join in, I think. We should go volunteer for Vivi and Iris. Or at least be there"
I nodded, my throat tight. "Yeah. We'll go."
The rest of the day blurred. We made it home, hung around the countryside house, and watched a few shows that felt hollow without Vivi's laughter filling the space. We talked about nothing important, sports, old memories, and how the world already felt alien. Anything to keep from thinking too hard.
Eventually, Elias turned to me, "You know… we can't stay broken forever. The world is different now. We're going to have to be different, too."
I nodded slowly, though the words cut deep.
Elias went home because of the new curfew, promising to be back in the morning. Tomorrow, we have too much legal work to do.
The apartment was too quiet without anyone.
After washing up, I brushed my teeth, the mint sharp on my tongue. The spiritual supplement injection stung in my arm. My body was fine, but my soul felt like it was peeling apart.
I opened Iris's door. Her room was frozen in time. The smell hit me first, faint, sweet, like old crayons and fabric softener. Clothes folded neatly in drawers. Drawings tacked crookedly to the wall. Her toys, which she'd never pick up again, were scattered across the shelves.
On the bed sat her teddy bear, worn and floppy from years of being dragged around. I picked it up, holding it against my chest. The weight of it nearly broke me. "I'm sorry, my baby girl…" I whispered.
Then I drifted into Vivi's room, our room. Her perfume lingered faintly, like the ghost of her smile; it was worse, her softness still lingered faintly in the sheets. I rifled through drawers, finding stacks of photographs, some beautiful smiling ones, some playful, some intimate, a close, private photo from the week she proposed, where she had that exact look like she could see the future and find it all tolerable for me.
My fingers trembled as I picked one of the pictures up. One selfie of me baking cookies as Vivi held the camera. There was ink writing near the top of the paper that said, "Property of Vivienne".
At the bottom drawer was the shirt she always loved seeing me in. It was cotton and soft from too much loving. On the chest was a small, faded print, a simple sunrise, pale oranges sinking into gold, and beneath it a tiny line of text: come home. She used to say it made me look warmer. Cuter.
I pulled it on, the fabric hugging me like a memory. For a moment, my chest unclenched. I climbed into bed and lay on my side, feeling the shape of the space across the mattress where she'd slept. Slowly, because then I lay down on my side of the bed.
But the emptiness there was unbearable.
Because habit is an anchor and grief is a tide, I scooted over to lay my cheek on the pillow that still knew the shape of her, Iris's teddy bear pressed to my chest.
The tears came without fanfare, not the theatrical grief I imagined in books, but the slow, determined leak of someone who is thoroughly emptying himself.
"Life's unfair," I whispered into the dark as if saying it into the room would make it true enough to believe some other option. "Unfair and cruel. But I swear to you both… every demon I find, I'll ruin them. Tear them apart until there's nothing left."
My voice cracked into a whisper. "For you. Always for you."
The vow was a small, private altar. I pressed my face into the cotton of the shirt and let sleep fold over me. Ragged and doubly edged with sorrow and a new, terrible resolve. The world outside had turned, and in the orbit of my grief, I had plotted a course. Tomorrow, I will honor them by not vanishing like a ghost.
I cried myself to sleep, hugging the bear tighter, vowing never to let go of that promise.