Distant Years

The first thing Shelly remembers is the blood in her hair. 
She was on the phone with Ryan's voicemail (always on the phone with Ryan's voicemail- she doesn't think there was a week in her first three years of college that she didn't spend chatting away at a mechanical emptiness, as if it were really her brother, as if he were already there- 
she thinks now she should have taken that as an omen) 
and she stepped away and cut the connection when she heard the screams. (Grateful for that, when she lay in the hospital, with a hole in her belly where her appendix used to be and a head full of morphine- so grateful that if God had to let one of them be hurt, at least He didn't force the other to hear) 
The first shot rang out like a clap of thunder and a spray of blood landed in drops across her face and hair. It clotted there while she lay on the floor, dried and scabbed over while they carried her to the ambulance. It crusted and itched and scratched at her cheek, and that annoyance kept her alive and conscious all the way to the hospital, like spider's legs skittering over her skin. 
She woke up in the New Year with 
blood on his face
where her hair should be. 
Dark, sticky.
Unclean.
Ryan had never bothered keeping kosher, not since he was old enough to go down to the gas station down the block, get Skittles with his allowance, and laugh at the idea that this somehow made him further from God.
It had been a desperate thought when he tried to give Emma pig's blood, and maybe it was just any thought other than how he'd been talking to vampires on the street to find out what she needed to be eating (human, they all said, but pig's the only animal that comes even close) and how she was changed and cold (one of them had snarled and called him an idiot- she's dead and you're next) and how his stomach always knotted up at the sight of blood, bile in the back of his throat-
Maybe he'd just been trying to think about anything else, but he had to wonder if maybe there was something to it. It felt unclean now, like Skittles and stadium hot dogs never had.
The whole room felt unclean, from where he'd tried to offer her blood and she pushed it away and it spilled and stained. Bits of meat and cereal ground into carpet because she insisted on trying to eat normal food, real food, but couldn't.
The way she'd tried not to stare at his neck. The way she'd finally admitted that the blood he brought her tasted dead. The way she cringed away like she'd been burned when he offered her his wrist, because she would never...
But she looked like she was starving, acted like she was starving, and God was judging him today. If he couldn't let her out (they said she was a demon now, she'd kill now, so there were handcuffs and chains and she didn't try to break free of them) he could at least make her healthy.
He'd taken her shoulders and tilted his head because she was stubborn but she wasn't that stubborn. When she bit and drank he let her because Emma would never-
Emma would never...
(She's dead and you're next.)
He wakes up with pieces of his hair and face and clothes ripped away and it hurts, but there are bandages over his neck and he's alive. And that's something he has to be grateful now, not something he can take for granted.
"You tricked me," Emma snarls, staring at him with the twisted and warped face she'd always tried to hide before.
The bandages had been in his jacket pocket, where he usually kept the keys to her cuffs. His concession to caution, so that even if she killed him she wouldn't be able to break free.
"You tricked me," he says. His voice sounds wrong and it hurts to talk. Hurts even more to know that they were all right.
Emma would never, but Emma is dead.
He crawls away from her, leans against the bed (this had been a guest bedroom, once), and that hurts too. Moving hurts, breathing hurts, thinking hurts.
He doesn't say it out loud because he can't even say it to himself right now, but he thinks, may you be written and sealed for a good year.
Even in his head, it sounds like
a lie. 
"Mom, my car just broke down, is all. I'd come home if I could." (Please don't cry.) 
It's the New Year and there is no blood in her hair, and she should be home with her parents. But she cannot seem to face any of her obligations today, and she sits on the floor of her new apartment kitchen and thinks about drowning them instead. A bottle of vodka sits next to her bare feet for this purpose, but she has not opened it yet. Not yet. 
Where is God?, she finds herself wondering. Where is this person who marked a few of her genetic ancestors as special one time and gets to make the rules about what they eat and drink, and when they fuck, and how they dress, but couldn't be bothered to step in and shelter a few of His children when they're doing their best to honor His name? (She has three scars- the burned hole through her shoulder, so neat and pink, and the dip in her abdomen that looks like she was punched in the gut and the dent never popped back out, with another neat pink burn right in its center. Deepa has a slash across her cheek and a tear in her ear where a ricocheted bullet just narrowly missed killing her. Joel's throat was a mess of bite marks and slash marks and surgical cuts, barely held together across a plate in his throat, and damn if Shelly hadn't been able to keep her hands off of it when he rode her. He touched her shoulder and licked the crease in her belly. They each knew where the other was vulnerable, and naked- naked in a way that the removal of clothes couldn't cover. There is no word for how naked their wounds are. She thinks a more attentive creator would have thought about that.) 
If she cracks open the bottle, will she learn just how attentive He can be? 
Ryan ate Skittles for decades to no ill effect, but Shelly almost died on the floor in a slapdash holy place, and it is a lot harder to divorce God from that. 
Where are You?, she wonders, and she pries off the cap with her thumb. It catches under her nail, ripping the skin so a bead of blood drips down the neck of the bottle. 
The second the blood 
his blood 
touches the surface of the clear liquid inside 
splattered across her face and hands 
the whole thing is trief- torn, contaminated.
thin and dried, dead.
All thoughts of its kosher status will be rendered moot. 
She drinks it anyway.
Licks it off of her fingers, scrapes at the streaks on her cheeks, sucks it from under her nails.
Ryan doesn't think he's ever felt so sick in his life.
She stares at him the whole time, with cold and golden eyes. "How long have you known?"
"Known?" he says stupidly, because he doesn't know anything now, not when Emma isn't Emma and these last three months of trying to protect her, trying to hold on to her and save her had been...
What? Pointless, hopeless, idiotic?
"That I've been playing you," she says. "Faking all that bullshit about hating what I am."
Emma had always been good at faking things, she just hadn't done it much. She hadn't wanted to.
"Doesn't matter," he says, because he can't face the thought of telling her about talking to vampires, demons and people who know about them, and how much he'd needed not to believe everything they said.
She leans forward, flexing against the cuffs enough to make them rattle. "Let me go." It's a command, not a suggestion, and it sounds like a threat. Even if she doesn't have anything to back it up with, his heart races- she's not human, he's prey to things like her, and how strong are those handcuffs, really?
He shakes his head. He's seen what vampires do, he's been seeing it for years without knowing, they nearly killed Shelly for God's sake...
"No," he says, and wishes his voice was steadier. "I can't."
She snarls, low and guttural. Human voices can't make sounds like that. "Then you're going to have to kill me."
The side of his face throbs. He can't think like this.
He realizes that he can't visit Mom, Dad, and Shelly like this. He could never explain why he looks like someone in a horror movie who'd barely survived the monster. He should've thought of that before.
He's
such an idiot
sometimes. 
She's drunk, she knows she's drunk, she's never drunk this much of anything this hard before, and the result is not at all like the girly drink buzzes she's used to from parties or the gently fuzzy feeling she's had on a Pesach or two with a tad too much Manischewitz. She's stumbling around her apartment and can't see very well, and everything seems to be angry and blurred, cold soft-focus edges on a hot, hard reality. 
"Do You hate this?" She asks the ceiling. "Hm? Is it the blood or the vodka, 'cause I'm curious." Vodka isn't usually handed out on the sabbath. 
She receives no answer. Not that she expected one. 
It's so stupid, she thinks. This is all... so, so stupid. 
The bottle slips from her fingers and crashes to the floor, flooding over her feet in a cascade of grain alcohol and pieces of glass. Slowed reflexes, probably, but at the moment, it's fun to think of it as divine retribution. 
"Is that how You're gonna be?" She asks in a weak, sickly chuckle. There's a quiver in her voice and a threat of tears in her eyes. "You could just talk to me," she murmurs quietly. "Couldn't You just talk to me?" 
Of course not. Who can? Certainly not the eleven others pulled from the fire, all broken and bleeding with the same animal-scared eyes she was sick of seeing in her own reflection, the silent conspiracy of supportive denial they were all maintaining about what the fuck they really saw. Not Mom and Dad, in their safe, cozy world where temple is on Saturdays and their kids are amazing and everything is warmth and comfort, safety and love. And not Ryan, the only one she told, who insisted it was just the painkillers and that later on, everything would make sense. (Fuck you, sibling. Nothing makes sense.) Not God... never God. 
Who could talk to her now, really? And what the hell would she even say? 
"You like that," Shelly whispers, "wait 'til you see this." 
She steps over the glass and reaches for her utility drawer. She doesn't remember when she bought the scissors, or why it seemed to her that she needed them. 
Maybe it's all part of a plan after all. 
She starts with the longest strand in the front, the one that crusted to her cheek with the blood- her blood, her friends' blood- and it's only meant to be a little test, a little act of defiance, a little bit of goading to a creator she feels out of touch with. But nothing happens and she starts to wonder if maybe it's enough. 
One strand becomes two, becomes four, becomes ten, and soon she's snipping off fistfuls of the hair she's worked so hard to grow, blonde and fine, just past her waist. Each metallic slice sounds good, feels freeing, and she can't seem to stop. 
It's a crisis of faith. And she doesn't know what else to do.
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