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Lena does not love Annette.
Annette knows this.
Sometimes, Lena curls up in bed, shivering from nightmares. She hates being alone and she craves someone's touch, someone's reassurance, but not Annette’s. It is, however, still Annette who runs a hand through her hair, works the knots between gentle fingers and waits for the storm to pass. At some point, Lena slips into dreamless sleep and Annette watches the shadows writhe on her porcelain face. How long has it been since either of them slept through the night without waking one another?
Sometimes, Lena sits at a window and loses herself to the sky. Blue or grey, threaded with clouds or veiled by endless rain. She forgets the tea she left on the stove, forgets the television droning in the living room, forgets that she'd been talking to Annette, forgets everything until sunset. Annette does nothing. She turns the flame off, serves a single cup of tea and leaves it to sit untouched until it's poured down the drain at night.
The cupboard door in their kitchen breaks and it stays broken until Lena scrapes her knee. Annette takes the door off and tosses it out. Nothing to fix if the problem isn't there.
Annette doesn't love Lena either, or at least she hopes she doesn't.
Love, friendship, passion, hope—none of that survived the war, not in this body of hers, warm and pulsing when all her friends lay cold six feet under.
They mostly spend their days in quiet. No one visits them, either out of misplaced courtesy or hesitance. What use would it be to visit two women who lived through the war with nothing but their flesh intact? Why trouble them? Why hound them? Why leave them to themselves, to fade away with time, to be forgotten eventually?
But they're usually quiet because it's difficult to talk without reminsicing, difficult to hear each other speak. Some days, Lena calls out to her and Annette jumps, momentarily stung by the phantom jolt of a Para-RAID. Some days, Lena’s frown says it wants Annette dead. It would have been easier to mourn everyone rather than have one living reminder breathing down her neck at every possible moment, locked in the same house forever and ever. Annette knows this because she wishes the same.
She lives the same day over and over and it might have been just that bit easier if it weren't for Lena.
Annette won’t have to pretend she can pull herself together. She won't have to cook or do the dishes or wash up or change the sheets or mop or broom or do anything but lay in bed and wait for the rot to claim her if it weren't for Lena.
Annette wasn't born to the average, everyday life. It prickles under her skin, it slinks around like a secret, second skin, telling her to leave the stove on next time and let everything catch on fire. It has to be the same for Lena.
If one day, this boring, monotonous, draining life gets to Lena, Annette will watch her fall apart with relief. Or she hopes she would. She doesn't love Lena, but some strange part of her has always cared when it shouldn't, and it cares now, when it should care the least. She can't kill Lena and she can't see her break apart even if she wants it.
But then again, Lena doesn't seem to know that Annette doesn't love her. Her idea of love has long been dead.
Lena doesn’t—can’t—know that a much younger Annette used to think heat death meant the universe was slated to overheat until everything melted into celestial magma. It used to be a comforting thought. Her and Lena, swirling together at the end of the world.
The world ended quite differently.
Annette is so, so cold, her bones could be ice. Lena, on the other hand. She runs hot. She cries and crawls into bed with reddened eyes and flushed cheeks, thanking Annette for the blanket, or the dinner, or even placing a bookmark between the pages she was meant to be reading.
She doesn't understand that Annette really, really wants her to die. Maybe Lena would have more life if she were dead.
Whatever this is—hovering over her, knees digging against Annette’s unclothed thighs, pulling the flimsy gown over her head—is a corpse. She moves and sometimes she is warm to the touch, but she is dead. She kisses as an apology and as thanks, neither of which Annette wants to receive. And she trails down to bit and nip and lick, leaving traces that will bruise in the morning, desperate to touch, to mark, to hurt. She wants to kill Annette, too. Maybe to free her. Maybe to have her peace all alone.
Maybe, Annette thinks as she flips them over, eyes fixed on Lena’s heaving chest, it's so that Annette will be spared seeing Lena die, too.
Her childish dreams of heat death come true on nights like these.
Lena shakes, gasps, hot and heavy into every sticky kiss. She croons, moans, then whimpers on Annette’s stiff fingers, puts on a show to whatever extent she can. Her skin is soft. Her hair silky. Her wedding ring shines in the moonlight, swinging at her neck because it doesn't fit her thinning fingers anymore. None of it dispels the cold. Annette grits her teeth, strains her hips leaking over Lena’s quivering thigh. She hisses when Lena pinches her nipples but it pushes her over the threshold.
Pleasure is pleasure only as long as she sees the uncertainty rearranging itself on Lena’s face.
This, too, Annette knows, is just as much for Lena as it is supposed to be for Annette. It has happened so many times, and it will happen again, and again and again, that Lena believes she has taken from Annette and has to give back. But even in trying to give something, Lena takes from her. Annette lets her.
And as pathetic as that is, Annette will let her until one of them dies.
(Annette hadn't been wrong about Lena wanting to kill her after all.
All it takes is breaking a routine, and no one visits, so no one finds two cups of tea and the two slumped over in eternal sleep.)