The Sundered

by Ruthanne Reid

  Harry hid his face in his arms. Maybe when he went mad, they’d finally let him go. They’d finally let him d—

  The thought never finished. A bursting storm of love and acceptance and togetherness exploded in his brain, in his body, stinging like rain and gripping like invisible arms, and he could not keep himself from drowning in it. His body seemed to disappear, at least to his senses, and there was nothing but home family us we I ONE to rock him to sleep.

  Harry came to some time later, still on the island-nub, shivering because that love-storm had gone. His nose had bled. He was alone.

  Not alone. “Paint something,” said the being who’d named himself Aakesh, lying on his side and touching the water as if inviting it to a deep and intense intimacy.

  “I can’t,” Harry whispered, and wept into his folded arms.

  ● ●

  ● Love Makes Whole: A Sundered Epilogue ●

  542 (Gorish)

  To say Gorish loved was like saying the black water hated humans: it was an easy given, and never changed.

  He had loved Harry from the beginning—Harry, a human toddler with big hazel eyes and nut-brown skin, Harry, a smiling and creative child with imagination big enough to justify humanity’s existence, Harry, a sweet human child with none of the fear his owners (parents?) planned to instill.

  It was all about fear, being human. They had to be afraid of each other. They were broken, separate, apart, and could and did harm each other throughout their strange past. Sundered Ones could not hurt each other; they were one, and they were happy, and the idea of self-harm was so foreign as to be disbelieved when they first saw it in the human minds.

  Gorish knew better now. He’d “died” at their hands a lot (five hundred and forty-two, Quimby supplied).

  Five hundred and forty two times. That was more than a lot.

  Still, still, he had loved the human child, had watched with joy as Harry discovered drawing and painting, had eavesdropped with delight as Harry spun tales of flying boats and scavenging in the clouds. Harry was beautiful and bright and buoyant—and then it all came to an end.

  Gorish wept when Harry’s grandfather broke him. In that time, when Harry’s dreams were mangled and the shackles of fear locked around his throat, Gorish’s own focus dimmed (as did all Sundered focus—what affected one affected all). He grieved.

  They grieved.

  Gorish escaped the only way he could: through “death.” Oh, humans had no idea what Motherwater really was, or what the Sundered really were, or why “dying” was an effective if painful escape. When a Sundered One died, the humans simply dumped the body into the water.

  She cradled them when they came home.

  They were born from her, splashed out like droplets from one common pond, and they were one. The humans’ heinous machine kept them separated, but they were still one, and Motherwater was still home/lover/mother/creator/source.

  Usually, Motherwater was enough; they could be healed, revived, reborn. But there were twelve Sundered Ones at the bottom of Motherwater, deep near near her secret heart, hidden away from light and the dangers of human awareness. Twelve with such damage and so many deaths, that not even their Mother could heal them, and they waited there for ... what?

  None of them knew. They waited, nevertheless, because Motherwater was unwilling to absorb them back into herself. Only then would they be truly gone.

  Five hundred forty-two. Gorish had nearly been the next to join them.

  Every time a Sundered One died, they lost something. Some skill or memory, some snip of intelligence, some ability to be themselves. By the time the Hope fell, Gorish’s brain felt like a faulty electrical socket, working unreliably and always threatening to short out forever.

  Hide, rest, Aakesh had urged him.

  Not yet. Not yet. Gorish knew Harry would be the one. Gorish needed to be part of that, to show Harry how to love back.

  There was no such thing as true argument among the Sundered. Gorish’s choice to seduce the Iskinder with true love was all their choice.

  It had been a difficult choice. Love and fear and anger and worry and hope and admiration and courage rippled through the entirety of the Sundered like a breeze on the skin of the water as Aakesh and Bakura argued, but it changed nothing. Humans could do the same: arguing with themselves, judging pros and cons. The Sundered were still one, through and through, no matter what the humans did to them, and they made their choice together.

  Gorish’s choice mattered. He loved Harry Iskinder; he mourned Harry’s decision to stop creating, to stop drawing, to stop dreaming in favor of attempting to please his owners (parents, grandparents—what was the difference?). Driven by love, Gorish had flung himself into Aakesh’s last great plan, a plan four hundred years in the making, and he’d done it for the joy that would come.

  When it was over and the Hope was destroyed (no more interference, no more unclear thoughts), Gorish regained most of what he’d lost. Not all—some things, the Sundered had lost forever—but most.

  His love for Harry remained.

  Harry had saved the Sundered in the end, though he did not see it that way, and oh, he had suffered for it. His aloneness rippled through the Sundered as if his every sob were a rock thrown into placid water.

  Aakesh claimed Harry and that meant they all claimed Harry One was one was one and so Bakura hated Harry but Gorish loved him, and that prevented centuries of anger from boiling over onto the young man’s head. Harry was theirs, safe, never alone because alone was the worst in all the wide universe. Yes, Harry felt alone, and yes, Harry felt shame, but he was wrong (not his fault, the humans had destroyed themselves, but he could not see that yet).

  Gorish had hope. Gorish knew: love makes whole. It just takes time.

  “Paint something,” he whispered in Harry’s ear, and put a paintbrush in his hand.

  ● ●

  ● Love Makes Whole: A Sundered Epilogue ●

  Paint Something 2 (Harry)

  The boy stared at Gorish, then at the orange paintbrush balanced between his fingers (bright orange, crazy orange, the same orange as Gorish’s skin and Aakesh’s eyes). A perfect brush, tipped with fibers unlike any Harry knew. “Why?” he said, his voice cracking from little use besides sobs.

  “Because you are meant to,” said Gorish with an unusual touch of eloquence, and then he just hopped away into the water with a splash.

  Harry rubbed his eyes, then (he couldn’t help himself) played with the fibers of the paintbrush. It was far stiffer than human hair, and thicker. He liked these fibers. They’d probably hold paint well.

  An image of his father-figure-turned-attempted-murderer flashed into his mind, offering him a paintbrush, smiling, encouraging him to create between trips to the black water because creating ... creating ...

  What had he said?

  For a moment, Harry couldn’t recall (it had been five years ago, and something he’d tried to forget), but the omission in his memory of a man now dead speared him with panic, and he began to breathe too fast.

  “Gently,” said Aakesh, rising from his weird water-touches to crouch beside Harry. “Gently. Calm.”

  Shut up was what Harry meant to say, but what came out was, “I killed him.”

  “He was going to kill you,” Aakesh said unnecessarily, as if Harry could forget that, as if that made anything better. His too-warm fingers explored Harry’s scalp, sending heat and unwanted relaxation down his spine and into his shoulders and across his back.

  “Quit it,” said Harry with a shove.

  He might as well have pushed a landfall. “Gently,” said Aakesh, and he did ... something.

  Something that felt like a snap in Harry’s head, something accompanied by a flash of white and an all-over feeling of sensation that wasn’t quite pain, but certainly didn’t feel good. “Hey!” he started to argue, and then he remembered.

  Remembered as if—

  As if Parnum were right here now, as if Harry were experiencing the wh
ole thing in this very second, as if no time had passed and no grief had burned and no sorrow had scarred him beyond the initial shock of seeing black water to the horizon with no hope (no Hope) anywhere at all.

  Parnum had taken his hand and given him a brush and a huge blank wall and told him to paint. Create. Do it. No arguments allowed, no hesitation accepted, even if it meant just smearing lines of color across the smooth surface.

  But it hadn’t been just lines. Harry painted his life. He painted the water, painted the boats, painted the color of the sunset on that water (that orange it was THAT ORANGE IN AAKESH’S EYES why hadn’t he realized before), painted the Travelers and his father and—

  And boats rising from the water to freedom and a tall, glittery palace that had to be the Hope and smiling faces all around because the world would be saved and the horrible water destroyed and the oceans would be blue again and everything would be made right and—

  When he’d finished, he was weeping. And Parnum had held him, talked him through it, washed the paint off his hands. Somehow all of that mattered, and when Harry went back to the water, he did it feeling better.

  He remembered it all. Aakesh’s fingers (uncomfortably hot, always) slid out of his hair, and their owner looked at him. Just looked, waiting.

  Harry shook. He should say thank you, or something. Or maybe screw you. This situation could warrant either. “You were there? You saw that?”

  “You were there. All you have known is in you, Harry Iskinder, locked away to preserve the resources of your finite human brain. But we are not so fragile.” Aakesh tapped the side of his own head. “You grieved the loss of that memory, and so I grieved it, too, and thus I brought it back—I admit, to a purpose. Paint something, Harry Iskinder.”

  Harry still shook, and he looked at the brush in his hand as if it were a weapon. Maybe it was. “Why?” Aakesh’s hot fingertips slid across his spine, and he shuddered.

  “Because I will not see you broken,” Aakesh said (whatever that was supposed to mean), and his soft tone terrified and promised and barricaded like unbreakable law.

  They were crazy, Harry decided. All the Sundered Ones were crazy. He wiped his face on the back of his hand.” I don’t have any paint.”

  Aakesh gave him a dry look (dry while surrounded by water, haha). “Did you think we would not provide?”

  Harry opened his mouth to protest, but could not. He didn’t know.

  He didn’t know anything anymore.

  ● ●

  ● Love Makes Whole: A Sundered Epilogue ●

  By the Numbers (Quimby)

  One, two, three, four, fifty-three alive—no more!

  Quimby loved numbers. She loved to count, to hold the infinity of counting in her head, to know the number of stars seen and unseen (yes, all of them. How could she not? They sang), and even the number of nubbly little bumps all over her red sea-star body.

  She chose to keep her gender. Not many others did.

  The Sundered were shape-changers, their forms altering with every thought as sheets billow and undulate in the wind, but sometimes, they’d find a form they liked and keep it. She had no intention of giving up the star form, or her tiny teats, or even the small, slitted place between her lower points. She liked being a girl. She felt pretty.

  Her own joy rippled through all her brethren like a breath on hot coffee, and here and there, colors bloomed: Sundered Ones matched the red of her reflection in the water, or borrowed her shape and added more points, or chose complementary colors just because they could.

  An old image (either from her memory or a sibling’s, it was one and the same) came back to her, caught long ago from one of the humans who’d originally landed here: sharp cracks and the smell of smoke, insane light-flowers bursting in the sky. Suddenly in love with the word firework, she flew into the air and began raining white sparkles upon the black sea.

  She flew right over Harry’s lonely island (alone in his head, though since he was with the Sundered, he wasn’t alone at all) and dropped extra-special sparkles in his favorite colors of orange and white. But he didn’t understand this was a present; he stared after her, mouth open, then looked down at the sparkles fading in his hand, melting like snowflakes.

  Tiring of sparkles (ha! That was a joke. She could never tire of them), she looped around Motherwater, plunging down and in and out again, singing and making squeaking sounds that meant nothing and everything at the same time. She’d help Harry understand. They would all help him understand. He was not alone. It was just going to take time.

  The Sundered had been silent until the humans came. Perfect mental communication and a world without noisy creatures did that, but then humans had arrived—oh, humans!—with heads and mouths and rooms and machines filled with noise. Noise, noise, beautiful noise, noise with meaning and noise with none, noise for amusement and comfort and warning, wake-up-now noise and go-to-sleep noise and noise for everything else. If they weren’t making noise, they were remembering it. Even copulation (Pleasure! For joy! Just because!) came with its own set of breathy sounds, and the Sundered latched on to all of this as if they’d been starving.

  Quimby had not been able to understand the feelings and thoughts in humans’ heads. Humans were sundered (alone? How could any thinking, feeling creature be alone?), and they carried pain, a completely foreign concept, and they caused pain (what?), and they even killed each other. Somehow. For some reason.

  There was nothing to relate any of it to. They were incomprehensible. On top of all that, the humans had abandoned their own world for dead (the thought of a dead Motherwater made her weep, once she’d learned how), and the only possible feeling in the wake of all this horror was pity.

  Maybe the humans were sundered because their world was dead. Maybe that made them sad and hurtful. It only made sense to offer them help. Why, of course: the answer was to heal their sundering!

  The attempt to fix them almost broke them.

  The joined fifty-three humans (soon to be fifty-four, which was utterly unbelievable—they’d MADE another one) together as one, and the humans promptly passed out, brains bleeding, bodies strained. These human creatures really were broken. The Sundered—who were not yet sundered themselves and had no such label—conferred like a human debating with herself, and realized that these poor, homeless humans could not be one.

  It was the most tragic thing they could conceive.

  Quimby wanted them to be happy. She adapted to singing, though it was slightly more difficult in the perfect sphere-shape she then preferred (round like the sun, and just as red) and sang them their favorite songs. She changed first to male and then to female (ooh) to seem more familiar. She adopted the five-pointed star shape (ooh!) and showed up with little presents complete with sparkles and bright colors and many, many feathers for the humans to make them happy.

  None of it worked.

  She borrowed their memories to make them flowers and recreate tiny toys (toys!) from their youth, but like everything else, they only reacted with fear.

  They seemed to think seeing their minds was attacking. Why? Why?

  She kept trying. She decorated their quarters. She re-made their favorite pets out of water and earth and breathed them alive. But everything she did sent the humans into spasms of paranoia, then fear, then anger.

  Their utterly insane reactions made Bakura angry (he’d only just chosen his name, too; the idea of giving themselves individual names was such a silly one that the Sundered had leaped into it like a new game), and his anger sent a ripple of discontent through them all.

  Quimby kept trying (and since she did, they all did).

  Gorish, Aakesh (such lovely names they chose), all tried to make the humans happy. Nothing worked

  Gorish somehow finally figured out the bizarre truth: the humans wanted to be alone.

  There was no alone. It didn’t exist. Then again, humans had imagination and were always making up new things (it was the most glorious thing about them). They could dream
up stories no one knew and invent new items from scratch.

  Maybe alone was inventing something new.

  Giving alone to the human who demanded it the most was painful, but Jason Iskinder had so many things he thought were secrets (and such amazing memories) that they tried to give him what he asked.

  They gave him alone.

  It seemed to make Iskinder happy.

  And later, when the sundering happened —

  Later, when Iskinder claimed them —

  Later, when the Hope turned on and broke their perfect union —

  Later, when all the native animals were dead (“Get rid of the vermin”) and replaced with fake ones resembling Earth’s —

  Only then did Quimby decide: alone for humans was always bad, even if it made them happy.

  Quimby could forgive. Humans were broken, solitary things who lived their lives in the hell of alone (she’d been almost alone for four hundred years, but only partly, for even sundered, they were never truly separated). Besides, Harry had tried to be nice.

  Gorish loved him. So she loved him, too.

  Fifty-three humans had landed on this planet, becoming fifty-four soon after. Fifty-three now lived—chosen to survive, chosen to keep their race going—because Aakesh said so. Because he would not see them wiped out the way his own people had nearly been.

  Harry didn’t understand her presents at all. Squeaking again (yesterday, she sounded like a flute, so today, it was back to her favorite baby mice cries), she flew over Harry’s head again, and just for fun, changed his paintbrush to purple.

  It had eight thousand, three hundred and forty-eight bristles, and now all of them were purple tipped with red. Now, there was a present anyone would enjoy.

  ● ●

  ● Love Makes Whole: A Sundered Epilogue ●

  Beautiful Boy (Bakura)

  Rage was fire, and fire was beauty, and beauty was rage, and everything was mad and joyful and furious and right for the first time in hundreds of years.