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“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
― The Iliad
I.
She lives and dies on the twenty-four hour news cycle; no one thought to caution the diplomat’s daughter bearing the name of a Cold Warrior against running into a violent pocket of the world the long imperial fingers of Britain had misshapen, and left to fall. MacKenzie McHale is captured, sold to the highest bidder, and appears on every news channel in Western media on her knees with her hands tied behind her back and a gun pointed to her head.
Her mouth clumsily mispronounces the demands of her kidnappers. It is the only time she stutters on camera.
For days, she remains the top story. The third time the grainy video clip is played on his new show, he ends up on his knees in his bathroom after broadcast, imagining her grey matter painted on the floor of some mountain hut, a soviet weapon cocked and smoking above her limp form as he heaves up what little dinner he was able to stomach.
In his dreams, she laughs, and tells him that she loves him.
When he awakes, it’s to a phone call from her older brother, dull-shocked inquiring if he would like to know the details of her funeral arrangements.
She died the day before, eyes squeezed shut as she recited the Ave Maria and at the moment when the safety was pulled, murmured his name like it was her last beacon home.
He didn’t feel it.
Peering down at the silvery light illuminating his shaking hands, Will nods numbly, and reminds her brother that she wanted to be cremated.
II.
She’s never feared falling, or heights, or speed, or fire. Perhaps she should have.
The last time she was with Will was on a Tuesday; it was an unsuspecting day, and she hadn’t feared anything at all. It had been bravery born of ignorance, and it had fallen from her grasp, tumbled to the floor, and shattered into a thousand sharp fragments before she could puzzle out that it had fallen at all.
It had just been good ethics.
They’re shot down outside of Jalalabad, an RPG tearing through the twin engine of the Boeing CH-47, and the dying engine screeches like hulking metal beast the two hundred yards they live until the ground.
Remembering that she’s about to die being hated by the man she loves, MacKenzie learns fear. The closest she's come to feeling like this before was when Brian let her fall down a flight of stairs in the hallway of her apartment, sneering cruelly because he was drunk, because she could never live up to what he wanted anyway, because she was leaving, racing past him towards something he would never have.
The trees come closer as they spiral into enemy territory, and in the brief blinking moments before the ground comes up to meet them, she remembers how he clutched her hand through a storm over Illinois, shoulders pointed and tensed. Knuckles white, fingers clenched over hers on the armrest, he told her he loved her for the first time as their plane was tossed about in the belly of a cumulonimbus. And then exhaling raggedly, promptly forgot the words escaped his mouth.
She broke up with Brian when they landed in New Orleans, furtively whispering her angered farewell to him.
He didn’t call her for a year, after, and when he did she could hear the liquor in his stomach and the smug smile on his lips, asking her for just once for old time’s sake, and it reminded her of what she became.
Her neck snaps on impact.
Fuel reaches the engine, and the helicopter is bathed in flames.
It takes the Marine Corps two days to reach the wreckage, and another week to conclusively identify her body, matching up molar to molar against an old dental X-Ray. When he finally allows himself to read the report, Will remembers her teeth as they scraped over his jugular as he bared his throat to her.
III.
Jim survives. She sees the gunman first, and pulls him down, and when she looks up to peer through the smoke from the fire the gun cocks and fires. Mouth gaping into a surprised circle, she crumples to the floor where the air is clear. Jim survives, but he won’t let her go.
The bullet stoppers the bleeding from her neck, but they’re on the fourteenth floor and the hallways of the Pearl-Continental crawl with fires; the smoke chokes the oxygen from her brain before shock does, her blood wine-dark and sticky on them both.
“Tell him,” she gasps.
The floor crumbles to ash below Jim’s feet, and he takes shelter in a concrete stairway.
“Tell him,” she gasps again, reaching up with scorched eyes to touch his face.
He is afraid, but she is dying. “Mac? Tell who? Tell him what?”
She cries, tears streaking through the dirt and ash caked onto her face.
Cupping his hands over the wound, he tries to staunch the flow. The building around them quakes and he fears that it is pointless, that he too shall die.
Her last word is feeble and the sound of it is swallowed by the roar of the destruction framed around them. Blood burbles through her lips, and in the time it takes for him to look to the door and back hoping desperately for reprieve, her eyes have emptied out.
Jim survives, and holds her hands for miles.
He meets Will McAvoy at her funeral, and tells him when he asks that Mac died bravely, uncertain if it is a lie.
IV.
The last thing she sees as her vision whites over is a startled sky full of stars as she’s rushed by Navy medics from the inside of Kulsum International Hospital onto the helo. Living in Manhattan for so long they’d been obscured by the city lights, but half a world away they’re fiery and bright.
Not so many as the six months in the desert, Islamabad is a city unto itself after all—if MacKenzie keeps her eyes open, there isn’t any pain at all. It’s all dead light, stars that lived and died all before their burning aftermath reaches Earth, like frazzled waves of a broadcast that twinkles in and out of existence, like lips mouthing words unheard.
Blood pounding in her ears she blinks up at the sky one last time before she’s swallowed up into the belly of the medevac. She’s been stabbed; she remembers falling to the pavement with her face to the concrete, until Jim got to her and rolled her onto her back and with her pulse roaring in her ears, she saw stars.
In infinite space, she collapses into herself.
She arrives in Landstuhl with the burn marks from the defibrillator on her chest, but no pulse.
Three thousand miles away, Will McAvoy lays on his balcony, looking up at the one last little bright light hanging over Manhattan.
V.
It happens slowly, and then all at once, until the scans come back and she can no longer deny that it’s just a nasty cough. It happens slowly, and it’s manageable, until the antibiotics don’t work and she’s dying, tucked away like a shameful secret in the quarantine ward of a military hospital in Virginia from a strain drug-resistant tuberculosis that she picked up in a refugee camp in Murree.
The last sense to go is her hearing, but still remains is the faintest imprint of touch against her limbs. The dose of morphine is high and after the last round of streptomycin fails the doctors observe her pityingly, and switch her to a more potent dose of dilaudid instead when all that remains is one lung and a chest full of infection.
When her optic nerves disintegrate from lack of oxygen she is almost glad of it, for she can no longer see the looks splashed on the faces of those who think of her as a spectacle. But still her fingers reach out and touch the Peabody’s on her nightstand, until she is too weak to do that, as well. To weak to do anything at all but fade out with her life, and wonder if she should have let Jim go to New York and tell him, like he swore he would do, if only she asked.
But she is not that kind of story.
On her last day her eyes open wearily, and she struggles to breath against the mask. But she put pen to paper before she was too weak to affix her own name to any sort of legal document, and she will not abide by a ventilator nor any attempts to save her life as if she could have saved it, many years ago, before she fled across the sea and back in her own attempt at the glory of war. The room is dark, and small breaths rattle in her lungs. She hears footsteps, and her arms shakes at the strain when she reaches out, half-delirious and touch-starved. A hand in latex covers her own. MacKenzie thinks she hears the television in her room switch on.
His voice builds images in her head.
“Tell him,” she gasps out, her chest straining, and as her body gives out she understands why Will reached for her hand on the flight.
The hand in latex squeezes her own, and she barely feels it. They cannot possibly know, but death and dying and her own folly has robbed her of everything but the two awards sitting a foot from her skeletal face. The room fills with light, and she hears his voice more loudly, even as the rushing sound of beyond comes ever closer, deafening the words.
“I loved—”
VI.
There’s nothing dignified about it; after MacKenzie’s death he began pulling all of her work from the Middle East, and the descent was rapid. For months it begins. What little left of him she had not packed along upon her first departure to the Green Zone, she steals after her death.
Will does not know how to forget her. But the bottles of Johnnie Walker clink against each other as he carries them to the recycling bins, and soon he loses himself in learning how to swallow the guilt that grows headier the more wire reports he reads, the loathing that continues to rise like an angry sea as he watches her on video, dregs of anger sloshing inwards as he swallows them down, mixes them with oxycodone, and prays for release.
He remembers her laughing, reads her emails from the warzone all in one go, and for days after is unable to find sleep.
One pill (as he reaches half-mad into the sunrise) doesn’t do it, and neither does the second. But the third goes down easily, and convinces him that the fourth will, at last, let him drown the pain.
Charlie finds him the next afternoon on limbs splayed stiffly across his bed and face down in his own vomit, lips blue. In his hand is a photograph with a heavy crease down the middle, of a young dark-haired woman (the time stamp in the bottom of the picture reads the fall of 2004, and even though the photograph is old, Charlie recognizes her from the picture over her obituary in the Times and he remembers the old gossip, now, and as he grieves, wonders what he could have done to save them both) with a dying laugh upon her lips, looking at the person behind the camera like they could save her.
(He couldn't even save himself.)