REVOLUTION IS MY NAME

“With how much ya' hog that couch, people'll're gonna start think yer livin' here, too.”

You're lounging there on her couch, legs too long for a love seat dangling off the tattered arm on one end and head rolling this way and that in vain for the one angle that might not kill your neck, but her comment causes you to jerk so terribly, gravity and a loss of contact on the entire right side of your body nearly succeed in pulling you down, pile of blankets and all, right down to the floor. In all of your life, you have never been the sort of person to think too long or too hard about the things that you have to do to meet an end. Experience, after all, has hammered in that it stirs up nothing but sour memories and a chorus of vile voices you're lucky if you can quiet down. Thought doesn't come into the equation of finding a place to settle down for the night; your body carries you where it will and lands you wherever is most convenient for another long, sleepless evening without so much as a second glance to who may be around or who may dare to judge. Up until now, it's only ever carried you to that horrible little hole on the outskirts of District Four, empty save for the occasional present of animal dung, a chair that can hardly support your weight, and a stroke of dust on the floor that's served as a better mattress than any. It had taken a group of hooligans and dung that came from a very specific type of animal to chase you out of there for good. What you hadn't realized was that your body, even after your “apartment” had been cleaned to a level it likely hadn't seen in years, still defaulted to whisking you off to the doorstep of your rebel partner. Still had you lounging there on her couch: legs too long for a love seat dangling off the tattered arm on one end and head rolling this way and that in vain for the one angle that might not kill your neck.

You nearly throw yourself off the offending piece of furniture because you're embarrassed.

(Aggie slips you a key on the sly, and the word “home” slips out of your mouth unbidden on one horrifically pride-wounding morning.)

This place doesn't feel like home, though, and you only catch yourself accidentally calling it that once. It's too – too cluttered, too noisy. The blonde isn't exactly the sloppiest woman to ever walk the Earth, and the other rebels will tell you that she's quite far from it, but when the most you're used to seeing littered across the floor is a chair, more than a dozen gun cases, and maybe a loose needle or two from when you weren't lucid enough to get them to the trash can, the typical home décor feels more like an obstacle course than tasteful interior decoration. You can't count the number of times your knee makes a violent collision with the coffee table, nor the number of dirty shirts tossed here or there that have almost sent you toppling face first into the carpet. The walls can't keep out the furious beatings of a drum set just an apartment over (as it turns out, the instrument is only desirable when you're the one playing it), but they can keep in the obnoxiously loud cries of a string orchestra's backing of yet another sappy romance movie, and they do echo back the leaking faucet of the bathroom so loudly you'd swear you could hear it as clear as day on the complete opposite side of the home. Your “bed” is too small and the smell of her food makes your stomach do flips. Your whole life has been quiet: Quiet apartment, quiet churches, quiet nights for quiet missions. Sometimes, it feels like walking through that front door is like walking into a concert band comprised of five-year-olds, every noise choatic and each seeking to overpower all that may stand in their way. Ibuprofen becomes your friend, ushering away each new oncoming headache.

But then there's the warmth of the heater, a puff of toasty air to greet you when the night-time chill paints your nose crimson and sucks all of the feeling out of your fingers. There's a television that tells you all about the world while you were away, and not a second of it is spent shaming your name. There is food in the fridge for the rare times you cooperate, clothes to change into when even you start to smell the stench coming off of your two in tact outfits, and there's – there's Aggie, hands on her hips and lips upturned into this toothy grin that makes you feel like you've just delivered the best punchline in the world, even if all you've succeeded in doing is pouting about the insufferable rebellion leaders and the feisty teenagers who tried to throw rocks at your head on the way home. She knows what you do for a living. She knows that there's probably not a spot on your body that hasn't warn the blood of another on it, and while you don't think you're strong enough yet to tell her that you're to blame for the death of the only woman you've ever loved, she knows that you haven't exactly been a paragon of pure justice, against your will or otherwise. But she never turns you away. At least, not because of that. There was a time where the whole country turned your way and thought of you as a monster, a beast less than human for stealing lives that were supposedly worth that much more than your own. And here she stands, a spitball of fire with a spirit stronger than you could ever hope to have yourself, and you're not a murderer. You're Nikki. She insults you the moment you take a step inside, but your heart feels light despite the words. Part of you hates this place, hates all of its normalcy, the fact that it's everything you had ever wanted when laying down in that hospital bed for two nightmarish years and know that you'll never really be able to have. Then she steps in the room, and without a word, she tells you that you can have it. It's yours already.

(You lie awake at night and stare at the phone just inches from your feet, waiting for a demon's call that will never come. You still hear him, though. After all these years, his voice is still crisp as a winter's frost, a purr against your ear that sends cold hands clawing down your spine. “You don't deserve this,” he says.

(After all this time, you still can't help believing him.)

...

You watch, dumbfounded, as his fist collides with the side of her face.

The two of you aren't even on duty anymore, free from the rebellion's menial tasks and slightly more interesting missions and making the trip home side by side. On any other night like this, you imagine, you'd have parted ways with her already, off into the city to gather information on her or to put a bullet through the head of him, hits asked of your alone by those outside your rebel group who still seek to put pigs in their place. Tonight, however, you've been roped up into plans. You owe her a movie night, at least three full films, and while you've been grumbling the whole day about how stupid the you of the past is and how you wish you could be doing anything but, but some dark corner of your mind can't help but feel relieved. As much as you don't like to admit it, murdering for a living isn't exactly fantastic for your mental state, and a reprieve, even if it has to be spent watching horribly unrealistic movies about romances that, unlike your own, work, is still a reprieve. A much needed one. It's along the way, though, that you run into him, a drunkard likely evicted from the bar that put him in this state. He throws up on your shoes (your only shoes). Common logic tells you not to pick a fight – common logic you don't have. So you rough him up, spitting verbal poison and grabbing him by his beer-soaked shirt, eyes practically tinged red as you imagine all the things you could do (but won't) to make up for a ruined pair of tennis shoes that have been with you since before you were broken in half and forced to hastily stitch yourself back together. When he swings, though, his aim is far from true, and the only one paying for your mistake in the next moment is the pony-tailed female beside you.

“Aggie!”

It was only a punch in the face some disembodied voice scolds him from the back of your mind, but images of another bloodied blonde, taken from you by a blow to the head flash in a strobe light of agony through your mind, and despite the fact that you should know she can take a lot more than that, you can't help but find yourself jerking toward her to make sure she's safe. She has to be safe. It's bad enough that you've let one friend die because of your inability to keep the people you care about out of your destructive tenancies. You'd sooner die than see it happen again. Unfortunately, the stranger is swinging again, and before you can get a proper look at your stricken partner, you're being knocked so hard in the mouth that your feet are giving out on you and – oh, ow, concrete on skull is not a combination you want to have any time soon. For five whole seconds, you black out, and when vision is kind enough to return, the star ocean above is spiraling out of control. That's no good, you think lamely. Thankfully, you wise up enough to take a look at your attacker just in time to watch Aggie pay him back double for what he's done to her, cursing all the while, and maybe it's the force of the impact alongside the alcohol, but something has him staying down and on the ground once she's through. It's a miracle; you're still seeing stars, and maybe the swimming celestials weren't so much dizziness as the tears now spilling down your face, but she not only recovered, but countered enough to put the threat to rest. It's hard, you decide, to argue against the scolding she gives you afterward. She has just saved the day, after all, and only half the words are capable of registering in your mind, anyway.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” you tell her dismissively as you struggle to your feet. (What you don't tell her is that every bone in your body is ringing with relief. She's okay. That's all you could have hoped for.)

...

“... Are you... Are you cryin' right now?”

“Wh-what? No!”

“Yer cryin' over The Notebook, oh my god.”

“No, I'm – o-okay, look, I've got – I've got allergies, and she doesn't fucking remember a thing, and what kind of asshat wrote this? Ugh.”

You scrub furiously at your wet eyes, hating yourself for every second that your heart overflows with emotion at the expense of these... these idiots on screen, and she laughs so hard you can't hear the movie over her hooting. (You'll never live this down.)

...

Your plate sits untouched at the table, half a portion of that which had sat on your roommate's just fifteen minutes ago. She's washing her plate off now, humming some tune that you can't recognize and imagine came about in the nearly thirty years you've missed as she goes, but you haven't even so much as picked up your fork from where you dutifully sit in her chair. For once, your stomach growls. It growls, a sound foreign to you, and if you really tried, you could down this entire meal without so much as a second thought or a moment's regret afterward. But you don't. You stare at it, blue eyes hard, and despite everything, your mind can only latch itself onto one thought. Come a week, you'll hate yourself for asking this – but then again, what don't you hate yourself for already?

“... Why are you doing all of this?”

“Huh?” she says from her spot at the counter. You can hear in her voice that she's not entirely paying attention; pretend all you like, but it won't change the fact that the knowledge stabs you in the chest like a spear.

“Why are you doing all of this?” you repeat, louder, with more intensity. If looks could strike, your plate would have been in shards within a matter of seconds, and with how hard you're found yourself gripping at your jeans, you're surprised you haven't ruined them, either. Eyes must be landing on you – you can feel them – but there's a choir telling you that you're not worthy enough to catch her gaze, and despite three years of trying as hard as you can, you can never ignore them. You don't catch her gaze. You can't. “The food, the couch, this – this place, I don't – I don't understand. I treat you like dirt. I'm dirt. I'm a – a bad, bad man, and I don't... I don't...” You don't know, you don't understand, you don't deserve any of this. You don't deserve the food or the couch or the key, and you don't deserve Aggie. She's so much stronger than you in every possible way, a grounding force that can bring all of those horrible voices to a screeching halt with no more than a playful tug of the lips, and of all the people in the city who deserve to be standing here in your place, eating with her, watching those horrible movies with her, you are certainly not one of them. The apocalypse cannot change the fact that you are an insane man, one who was loosing touch on reality until she appeared in your life. There were more who came after – the man from the fortune telling shop, the guardsmen who reminds you of yourself – but they aren't her, and none of them will ever save you like she has. “You don't deserve this,” you hear in a mantra, but even when you clamp down on your ears with both hands, your meal falling to the floor with a clatter of plastic against tile, he's still there taunting you, belittling you, reminding you that you are no better than the pigs in human clothing you murder in cold blood once a week.

“Why are you always so nice to me? I don't deserve it... I don't deserve it...”

Silence reigns heavy in that tiny little kitchen, and for sixty seconds of wonderful bliss, every thought in your head comes to a complete still. She sucks in a breath.

She tells you why.

...

There is the feralness of an animal in her eyes, a weapon in her hand, a thoughtless murder in her eyes. This tiny apartment, this would-be home becomes a battleground, every movie case tossed and every glass shattered into a thousand pieces on that tiled floor. And you know this isn't her – maybe her body, but not her mind – because the moment you started holding her precious films hostage should have been the moment she stopped, but all it earned you was blood in your eyes and panic anew. You're more experienced with self preservation, but she's so much stronger than you, with or without a new found disregard for her own well being. Familiarity rises like bile in the back of your throat. If you had even a second to waste feeling sick, you think you'd be throwing up right then and there.

You beg her for your life, and reality snaps her like a rubber band.

(You know betrayal like the back of your hand.

(You never wanted it to come from her.)