The silence came again.
I wanted to reach out, slide my hand over hers, and anchor her to the real. But my arms wouldn’t move. My muscles remembered the old man, remembered the warning.
You can’t fix her. You can’t fix anything. She’s broken because you broke her.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I wished for a blackout, for the darkness to swallow everything. But nothing could numb it, not really. Not even years and years of violence, of trying to break myself before anyone else could.
Amelia’s hair whipped against her cheek. She dug her heels into the dirt, swaying just a little. “It’s weird, how much changes, but this place—” She gestured at the rusted metal, the collapsing picnic table. “It just stays the same. Like it’s waiting for us to fuck up again.”
I barked a laugh, harsh and raw. “Maybe that’s all Pathosbury is. A graveyard for every version of us that didn’t make it.”
The words hung there, slicing open the quiet.
Amelia drew her knees up, hugging them. Shadows bled up her arms, painting her skin the color of bruises. “If that’s true,” she said, “I think I’ve buried a hundred Amelias in this park alone.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. My throat clenched, refused to let anything out.
Eventually, I managed: “Some ghosts never stop digging. No matter how deep you put them.” The statement chilled the back of my neck even as I said it. “I see them all the time. Every night. Yours. Mine. Lillian. The old man. Even the kid I used to be, before I learned how to hurt people.”
We rocked on the swings, creaking like coffin lids. The wind whistled, threading ice through my muscles. The moon pulled higher. Amelia’s face was white as bone, eyes black in the shadows. If I squinted, I could see the little girl she used to be. Torn up, desperate for comfort.
I pictured myself then. Not a hero. Just another bastard in a line of bastards, too weak to break the cycle.
She broke the silence. “I hated you, you know. For so long. But it never made anything better.” Her voice strained. “I hated you, and I hated myself even more for letting you get to me.”
The way she said it, it didn’t hurt, not like I expected. It felt honest. I felt lighter for having it out there, in the open, even if only for a second.
“I deserved it,” I said. “Every bit.”
A gust whipped through, slicing straight down to the bone. I glanced at her, watched the cold bite color into her cheeks.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just—” I stopped. Words knotted in my tongue. “I just wish I’d been strong enough to do something different.”
She twisted the swing so it groaned on its axis, staring into the dark. “The world doesn’t let people like us have that kind of strength.”
I nodded. “Yeah. But sometimes it feels like the stars are watching. Like they keep a record of every bad thing we do. Like they’re waiting for us to ask forgiveness.” I looked up. Those dizzy, cold, endless stars, more judgmental than any living witness. “But they never answer. They just...hang there. Pretending not to see.”
That got her. I saw the shiver cross her shoulders.
“Maybe that’s what hell is,” she said, voice fragile. “Being stuck under the same sky, night after night, with nothing left except memory.”
The ache was so bad it threatened to crack my ribs.
The swings barely swayed. Everything stilled except for the pulse in my throat, hammering out the truth. I’d never be free of this, of her, of the way we locked ourselves in each other’s darkness.
She sniffed. “I always thought if I made it out of here alive, I’d never come back. But here we are.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Here we are.”
The stars trembled. The moon rose higher. The weight of everything pressed down. Black water, cold and endless, pushing us deeper into our own graves.
We just sat. Watched the sky tear itself open with stars. Let the wind strip every feeling out of us except the ones we couldn’t name.
Dizzy. Suffocated. Alone together. I didn’t know if it was a curse or a blessing.
Next to me, Amelia went still. Not frozen, more like she’d decided to let the pain have its way with her. I envied that. My whole life was an endless fight against feeling anything at all.
Eventually, I said, “You want to head back?”
