The Heartbreak Fate

Lucretia and Harcourt had died and died again so many times, living had become a novelty.

Every time they fell in love, you see, they died.

No one lives forever here, least of all those who allow love to consume them — but I have, I do. Watching on as infinite flames ignite and extinguish around me, such beautiful strikes of a match first grazing touchpaper in vivid spoil before the darkness engulfing me and the pinpricks they call stars ultimately takes them, too. Here, it’s always tasted of sulphur and the bitter oil of spoiled apples.

This fated pair has burned for one another for as long as love itself has existed. It was I alone who saw those tiny flames (all creatures hold them in their craniums crook) ignite and turn them back to stardust. Love is the curse to them all.

I myself though have been admired by many names: the Wahoo they say, Universe, God, Kami and the like. They sing for me, take to their knees, or open their mouths in gaping chasms that sometimes sound like laughter but most often are agony, the kind that comes as flames swallow them whole and start them anew.

Lucretia and Harcourt had been doing this, like clockwork, for as long as time was a construct they understood. Even before, I sometimes entertain, they fell and destroyed themselves for one another… Though perhaps this, time, is not the right word… it is something so insubstantial in the face of their unbending glory.

I choose to scrutinise their story in this way because despite my omnipotence, I must have my perfect ending where their love is not a limiting factor in their separate epic tales. I insist on seeing their individual outcomes; having taken such care in their perfection it is quite frankly my due. And yet, no, they strive toward each other so incessantly that each time this satisfaction is carelessly robbed. Do they not care how they forsake me? Beyond their own impotence — care for their own preservation?

The ending I so desperately covet, to visualise what the outcome of their power can achieve, is never granted to me. I have laboriously watched them love and fail.

For you, in layman’s terms, they could somewhat be described as my Achilles heel. As you should well know, he too was a great hero felled from love’s machinations.

Despite her impending misfortune and how she will disavow me, the name I have always preferred is the one when she speaks of me.

***

It’s Fate, Luke thinks as he intertwines his fingers with hers in front of everyone. No one had ever done that before, and she expects no one might ever again.

“This is Lucretia,” Harry introduces, and from the way his expat mates’ eyes blow wide at the sight of her, he knows they’re impressed. He drags his gaze briefly over her as she meets them each with that smile of hers, though all the while he is desperately digging — trying to find that part of himself that used to care. She doesn’t look like any chick from home. What he doesn’t notice is the way she holds his hand like it’s her last-ditch attempt before she free-falls over the edge anyway. Simply, he does not care to. “No, please that’s too formal!” she giggles, “Luke’s fine.”

His friend’s approval matters to an extent, but once the alcohol blunts the pain he carries he finds himself thinking it’s like they’ve known each other for years. He revels in how they fit together; from hands or the way she slots beside him to that corruptive hope rising within him again.

They’d met by chance online, and despite their own inhibitions it felt like something wanted them to meet. Forgoing all semblance of a slow-burning love-story, Harry couldn’t smother his passion and instead drew her in for a kiss as soon as they met. He’d seen that smile for the first time then, his only goal now was to keep seeing it.

Dipping low, he tries to steal a kiss.

“I hate you,” Luke doges him, apparently mid-conversation.

He tries again — “Shut up,” — then enraptured as she lets him.

Leaning back, Harry considered the obstacles their relationship would have to overcome as he watched his mates fall over themselves to buy her a drink. Firstly; in six weeks, he flew home to Australia. Perhaps more importantly than this he didn’t even want a relationship, wasn’t remotely ready for one. At twenty-three years old, half of Sydney already fancied him while the other half hated him for breaking their hearts. What he didn’t think on was that he’d met Luke on a dating app, which meant she did want something long-term — but Harry was never any good at caring about what the chick’s he hooked up with thought. Even this one, who made his heart spark like a lighter struck but not lit.

***

Just now, I note they’ve met again. I shudder at the memory of their little old souls seeking each other out from that first gasp of crisp freedom at birth — though am plagued nonetheless to watch on as they attempt to mock my desires again. In this lifetime they do not anticipate my intervention because modernity has made them soft, so dismissive of their primal instincts that before would have sensed my influence. They make children of themselves with the silly nicknames they go by, but I refuse to adhere to this folly: Lucretia and Harcourt is what they were born to this time, by this title they shall remain. To know one’s true name is leverage so sadly outdated.

This lovesickness, this disease will be eradicated. If I must suck the love from their marrow myself, I will deign.

Harcourt is the weaker one. I’d riddled his life with previous heartbreak, trying to light the flame and incinerate him before he could ever touch her. It’s a violent process making a soul so fractured, but Fate works in mysterious ways and in this I am thorough.

I watched Lucretia launch a thousand ships, bring a true noble man to his knees with an apple or corrupt whole empires with the roll of a rug. It was just a lifetime ago that I watched men crave so widely, a monarchy ended her for it before my control could even graze her (admittedly, not the outcome I had hoped for). Lucretia is indomitable, and yet, with this feminine man, she is broken every time.

This thought loosens the rest of my patience, so I latch onto my lustrous threads of stars, and I weave the whispers of their goodbyes — smirking as I allow them this sympathy. Among the billions in space before me I reach toward her. She doesn’t appear to me as you might expect, your simple eyes cannot see souls but in my space they are clear; a single iridescent line transposes her mortal flesh in exchange for just her true essence.

Already she glows with those dreaded fresh embers, so I rinse this curse out of her body for good.

***

“I promise you’ll forget me, darling,” Harry says. He can’t fathom how he wants that to be true while equally fantasising how she’ll break down in reckless abandon and beg him to stay. It’s wrong, he knows, to hope this and know when she does he’ll reject her anyway. “I’ll still text you regardless.”

She bobs her head once and the need to touch her suffocates him. Almost a foot below him, her features are dipped so low he can only see the crooked crown of her long brown hair. His fingers, jittery with recovered anxiety, twitch with the impulse to smooth away the upset she usually has so perfected.

This does not overwhelm the attachment to his own trauma, though, and that is their undoing. Years ago, Harry had given his love entirely to another girl, then another, then another and they’d all suffocated his spirit so thoroughly he swore never to let a woman trick him again. After months of tortuous arguing with his family, he had caved and gone to therapy. All that had achieved was half a person, who acknowledged he was filled with half as much serotonin as someone should have.

Her silence unsettles something deep in him, so he continues to fill the gap between them as he sits to manhandle his shoes on. In these last moments, he does not want to look down on her. “You and my friend should hook up, you know - he definitely likes you,” he croaks, voice breaking. He hopes she hasn’t noticed, but as he heaves in a panicked breath all he knows is her, the musk of her flat and the twang of her hairspray. The line has come out of nowhere, and they both struggle with their bafflement in an attempt to remain unfazed at his disregard to all they’ve shared.

“You must be joking,” Luke says. Leaning back against the banister, he can see the effort it takes her to smile behind this leisurely demeanour. Luke has always been one to hide her tears rather than expose her true feelings and risk being hurt more. “I’ve already told you I won’t get over you. Why would I want to start seeing your friends?”

There’s a smile somewhere trying to force its way out through the gratitude he feels that she won’t forget him so quickly. That she won’t move on from him, 10,000 miles away as he might be going.

“You have my blessing, darling,” he says instead, shrugging off her disapproval. She can’t see how much he cares because then he’d have to confront this, how much he burns for her, himself.

She tips her head back to the ceiling, and he wonders if she’s having a secret conversation with someone about just how awful he is. Can you believe this? Her eyes say, twinkling there under the bare flickering bulb above. He glances up, too, just in case there is someone there, telling her how to stop his flight. It would take so little from her they’d explain, just a brush of a hand or a kiss, but she wasn’t built to do either. Luke, too, has been carved harshly by the past and lost pieces of herself on her way to him so she will not crack now, not for him. Not for how little they’ve known of each other.

Luke knows in this moment that she loves him. Watching all six-foot-two of him cram into that chair at her door, the way his blue eyes saturated with so much melancholy refuse to catch hers, is enough to send her spiralling. If she stares at the ceiling long enough, perhaps the tears will slink back inside and he won’t notice her agony. It has always embarrassed her, to show her sadness to someone else.

He approaches her — no, the door behind — and her hope slips away. She will never forgive Fate for tearing them apart, her respect for the force she once adored so greatly obliterated. Harry never had, had told her so, but now she didn’t believe in love or Fate either. Sometimes, what’s meant to be shouldn’t be the way things are.

***

Lucretia hates me.

She manipulates her own sanity, she questions, forgets, and torments herself, but what she doesn’t realise is I know what is best. I am doing what is best for her, and for Harcourt, and I am giving them the opportunity for a future they have otherwise never experienced free from each other’s hold.

Of course, he struggles too, but not nearly as much. He has so much depth of emotion that it’s impossibly easy to send this version of him into a spiral of self-loathing. Often I forget his poor, unfortunate existence entirely.

A hand — not mine, personally I dispute her need for one at all — crafted her ribs wide enough to accompany both of their hearts, but this self-destruction has gone on long enough. She has the power to be a ruler, and he too such a successful villain if only they would let themselves.

In this moment, these moments, of contemplation, I do not see Lucretia slip out of my hold.

Across my blank space I see her arc of light spiral effervescently against the darkness toward him and before I can reach out and quench this insurrection he has torched up like a storm.

***

“That’s what he texted you?” Eleanor groans, disgusted. Luke is nodding hard enough she looks like a nodding toy in a car, but perhaps if she is thorough her friend will agree with her. “I’m sorry, Luke, but you deserve so much better”—the friend pointedly instructs with her spatula— “Don’t reply”.

Her head’s direction has taken a hard right, and now she’s shaking it vehemently. “You’re wrong,” she implores, “I’m going to reply to him. What I want is for you to tell me what to say.”

Eleanor’s attention takes a break from her pan long enough for a long-suffering look to pass over. Despite this, the text is written and sent in record time.

Moments tick by that eventually turn into hours; Luke is taking the train home, turning over every word in those dark monotonous hours with only the dust to hear her and yet there is never a response.

The days of silence coalesce into months bygone, she’s haunted by Harry still, of how it felt waking up that morning wrapped against him in the dull struggling light and begging the Universe please, I want this one.

***

The slip was brief but almost irreparable to recover from.

Thankfully, enough persuasion from Harcourt’s heartbroken friends left him so busy, with a phone so full of texts Lucretia’s own small attempt had no chance of being seen by him. Having expected no reply from her, he is free to live the life of success I so intend without ever knowing the truth.

Despite this, with each fresh burnout I must elsewhere deal with I notice Harcourt’s newfound strength grow. He has begun to wiggle against me too, now smouldering as Lucretia made him all those months ago — which is, of course, a major concern.

Around me the dust of fallen lovers is littered, my space a disarray, but nothing will distract Fate’s course in this love affair. I work to keep them both under control while half-heartedly maintaining my priority in passing on the other burnouts to their next chance of a future free from love. After the white light marking a fateful pair fallen in love disappears around me, I do not see what comes of those in my care.

I do not consider that Harcourt might seek Lucretia out despite the chance she has moved on, that she might even hate him. When I disregard his ticket to London I do so on the assumption he is still selfish, broken. Anything else. Who in their right mind would fight for someone who explicitly doesn’t want them?

***

Harry has taken his chances. Walking up these familiar stairs, he swallows down the feeling of utter wrongness and focuses on what his heart has always wanted.

With a breath, a last-minute spray of sample-size cologne, and a swift tuck of his loosened hair, he readies to go against his own instincts and meet her. His knock against the mahogany door echoes like a wedding bell back down the stairs.

The taste of musk is almost overwhelming.

***

I haven’t worked in days.

Another attempt to save them: fruitless. I allow the dust of thousands, perhaps millions if I could care to count, of victims pile around me.

For once, Harcourt and I are in agreement. I shouldn’t have let this happen…

***

“I’m sorry,” Harry says.

Luke’s heart has crawled so far up her throat by his visage at her door that she can barely breath, let alone speak. Soaked through from the typical London torrent outside, she wonders if he notices the strand of trembling hair hung over his sunken eyes — so at odds with his new healthy tan.

“Are you insane?”

“Only for you.”

“Don’t be funny!”

“I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”

“Harry!” She snaps, temper finally rising. It’s the kind of fury that, at a change in the wind, could quickly give way to tears. At least that way they’d both be soaked through.

Suddenly, as if a puppet-master tugged his strings, Harry jerks forward to grasp her arms. “It’s been a long six months,” he says, “I was scared before and I’m sorry — but I’m different now. We’ll be different.”

Luke has turned back to stone along with the rest of her, and she can’t find it within herself to care. Ironic, considering if Harry listened closely he’d hear the depressive music winding its way down from the speaker. What he does notice is her eyes and mouth split wide like she was facing Medusa personally, it’s enough to make him fill the silence with his words.

“I’ll wait for you for-” —he leans down— “forever. For forever.”

She wrenches herself out of his hold, stumbling back from the door. Desperately he follows her, seeking that warmth her eyes used to give. They go on like this until Luke meets a wall and Harry can embrace her again. Her crown is crooked, so he rights it.

“I can’t survive you again,” she says, fingers curled against her palms to avoid the urge to touch him.

“So don’t.”

***

Every time I roll over, I see a new pile of dust. The thought of seeing their dust sickens me — it’s just so grotesque. Why was this feeling worth dying for? Why? Why? I heave a breath and it chokes me, dries me out and scatters in a hellish cloud.

It’s moments like this that I wonder if I have a heart at all, occasionally I consider if I’m the problem — which is naturally preposterous. Of course it’s them.

“I hate you,” I say to space, imaging it’s the lovers.

“I hate you,” my words echo back.

I wish I could protest, as the humans do. Who would hear my complaints, in all this darkness?

“You’re an idiot.” They echo back, insulting me.

“I love you,” I try, forlorn, the words taste foreign in my mouth. Like fresh fruit.

***

“I hate you,” Luke says.

“No you don’t,” Harry laughs, rising from one knee.