Maybe one day she would get the hint but she’s so dense sometimes. Doesn’t see the red flags when they pop up like pesky garden gnomes, truthfully, she’d just eat the gnomes anyway. It isn’t like her to think about consequences, in ways Echidna is naïve and easily taken advantages of when the world tilts her what she thinks is her favor. But even after years of disappointment, she hasn’t quite gotten hold of the fact she’s as close to being cursed as anyone might dare. No matter how hard she tries, it’s never good enough. Some fierce kitty. She doesn’t even have all her claws anymore, so soft and childish, it’s almost embarrassing. If she weren’t so stupid, so bull headed about what she wants then things might have been different.

Doubtfully, but what’s life without whimsy?

The day is growing older around them. Burnished orange and red, copper colored leaves, the low hum of cicadas bubbling up from the ground. Her skin prickles with the first cool touches of evening and she shivers there beside him despite the warmth offered. He speaks in quiet tones, in a way that lets her know he is dreaming something else – something other than this moment, this weird reconciliation. Echidna holds her breath until his finger runs against his cheek and then she exhales softly, her dark eyes roaming the white expanse of his face. Life among the dead might not be so bad really, considering the company he keeps anyway. What did it matter if you had to throw a few dead souls into an endless void? Echidna leans back and thinks about it all.

About how small everything is, how fragile. The reason she’s here, the reasons he is, and does it even matter anymore? Part of her wants to ask a single question but it sticks in her throat because why beat a dead horse with a stick? It’s all the past, right? Echidna sits up, lifts those thin arms above her head to stretch herself out from laying on the ground for so long.

Go with what feels right, she says to him. By now I’m sure you’re old enough to realize what you want when it smacks you in the face.

Echidna tucks hair behind her ears, plays with the little stud for a minute. Life sucks, you know? I keep going around and around and it keeps sucking.

She brings her knees up against her chest. Like, it sucks in different shades of suck. There’s a whole spectrum of suck, Echidna chuckles more to herself than to him and shrugs at her own idea because who cared? She’d accepted the fact no one did. No one cared a single stitch about her most of the time but it was probably because she didn’t care about them, either.

No one cares or gives a crap, she murmurs, or if they do, they just end up hurt over something that follows them around for the rest of their life. There isn’t a point to anything, is there? We get up, we go out, we hurt others, and then we try to sleep it off like a hangover.

She bares her teeth either in a grin or grimace, almost maniacal. Her eyes flash a quiet red for only a second and then they relax into the same dark brown. Like me and you, Echidna says and looks at him. She doesn’t tell him that it’s easier for her to hurt others, it’s easier to forget she’s human sometimes when the feline consumes everything. Her hands slide down over her knees, her shins, she looks at her bare toes in the dirt and curls the grit between them.

Here we are for the hundredth time and we aren’t any closer to a resolution. We’re too spiteful for that, I think, or maybe I’m too spiteful. Resolutions suck anyway. Happy endings are a dime a dozen and people like me, we aren’t made for them. I’m guessing you had that particular lightbulb go off before I did, after all the crap I put you through, so you decided to cut your losses. Find someone better, Echidna bites her thumbnail. Her expression is bland, bored, almost catatonic.

She shrugs because to feel is to be weak, if I don’t make you happy, cut me out. If your current job doesn’t make you happy, leave it behind. If you don’t want to shove dead people into the endless void, don’t – for the sake of yourself, Tarquin, do the things you know will make you happy. Stop being stubborn or scared or whatever else and try to have a decent life in this rathole of a planet because it’s what you got right now. It might all blow to bits tomorrow and it probably will but don’t go belly up. That isn’t you. Echidna wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and spits on the ground.