tired and wired {epilogue}

So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.
--100 Love Sonnets, Pablo Neruda.
For every dawn a twilight falls, for every star a flame.
---
The girls have been named for the sisters lost, in the hope that they might recover the beauty of family through memory.
The new mother leans over the crib, trailing fair fingers over fairer faces, long dark eyelashes on tiny cheeks. The father is leaning in the doorway, smiling. He’s hoping that the girls will get his smile and their mother’s hair.
The doorbell rings, and the father straightens up, leaving the mother to marvel over her twins. There is a sound of surprise, then shouting and laughter.
The godfather is here.
He steps in, falls straight to his knees, soundlessly, on the carpet, and silently looks at the mother, asks for permission. She smiles and nods, and he takes the girls into his arms, one by one, and looks down at them as if they are made of gold.
One of the girls curls her minuscule fist around his hair and the other one coos.
Their eyes flash red and the crib bursts into flames.
Immediately, the godfather starts crying, great, heaving sobs that don’t cease even when the mother and father rush forward and embrace him, laughing.
Fire, water, air, earth.
Family.
---
The first thing the earthshaker and the teleporter do when they reach home is to get rid of all the cigarettes in the house. Under the sofa, inside the cushions, in cookie jars and wardrobes. Then they lean against the wall, and look at each other and smile.
Oh, they’ve done their crying. The earthshaker has spent many nights with the teleporter curled up in his lap, sobbing, and many nights he has stemmed his own tears. But now they will smile, because they have lived, they have survived, and they are home.
The earthshaker doesn’t have asthma and the teleporter doesn’t mind.
---
The older sister lies in bed, staring up at the ceiling, refusing to believe the younger is gone. The no-longer bodyguard sits by her bedside faithfully, keeps vigil, but finds no response.
But one day, one day there is a knock on the door, and there is a flash of golden hair, and there is a scream of relief.
---
The telekinetist finds it necessary to lift the breezebreather bridal style and carry him off the broken battlefield and into the house. It doesn’t matter that they’re both crying. They will stop one day, and they will learn to live with what they have.
They play the piano together, their favorite piece, and they lock fingers afterwards and lean into each other.
---
The dragon cannot fly anymore, but he is not a Shell yet.
It takes a year for the healer to work his magic, a year of staying by his side and singing him lullabies, of holding him through the nightmares, of cutting down his alcohol. It takes a year of kisses, of promises, promises made from the heart to convince the dragon because he no longer has the strength to believe, it takes a year of soft songs and a year of wiping away tears upon tears upon tears.

And then, a year later, the healer wakes up to find the dragon levitating in his sleep.
And he turns his face into his pillow and weeps.
---
The frostbringer spends a month in rehabilitation, to leech out the poisonous alcohol that he thought would take away the war. The electrokinetist takes in a room next to him, fights the doctors, fights the frostbringer when he wants a drink, fights tooth and nail and waits.
And when he’s done his waiting, he is rewarded. A month later, he leads the frostbringer out of the centre and buys him a bottle of soda.
---
The doctor takes the stitches on the girl twin’s legs, each one, slowly, gently, crying over each stitch. A hundred and twenty eight stitches in all, criss-crossing over her long legs, scars that she refuses to remove.
She wears them like badges of honor, and he crosses his arms and smiles at her proudly.
---
The no-longer killer wakes up to the boy twin, and when he remembers what happened, he starts to laugh, starts to laugh for the first time because he is forgiven and he has his love beside him, and he can start life anew.
The boy twin laughs too, and pulls out a box with two rings in it. There is no need to ask.
---
The Shell waits and keeps waiting, and listens to no one. He listens to no one, and he inspects his white hair with curiosity, and then turns back to the window and waits.
It takes two years for him to realizes that his firebreather is not coming back, not now, not ever, and he smiles and stands up, and he walks to the room where the empty canvases and dusty piano are, and he asks the telekinetist to play the firebreather’s favorite song, and he dips his hands into old red paint and dances.
---
Children will be children, and children will grow up, and when they grow up, they will learn to be children again.
There are a thousand pictures of the redhead and the trainer they lost, but--
There is only one picture of each Timekeeper, only one each, only one in the world.
---
The stormbringer Shell died smiling.
---
Throw some darkness on the walls, for the heroes with no name.