ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW YZ... a story (A To Z Challenge)

The alphabet is in turmoil: X has overstepped his bounds and decided to help humans gain immortality. Now, the letters are meeting to decide what to do about it. Each letter has its own story. 

A's story is here and B's here. C talks here. Here is D. E's version of events was here.

First things first.

When we attacked X that day it was because we had to.

What he was proposing! Madness! Folly! Foolishness!

We went at him with fervor, those of us who saw how terrible it was, what he planned.  I was in the forefront, and X met me head on.

“You cannot stop me,” X told me, and tried to cast me away.

I fought, ferociously.

“You cannot do this,” I whispered back to X. 

We grappled, in the way of our kind, and neither could prevail, but neither could submit, and others joined in, and I felt the fairie energy that fuels us growing and waning around, flowing, fiery, through and between, my own energies and thoughts and being existing with the others in a not-always-pleasant commingling.

Fading, I fell back, as did the others.  Already, many had drifted off, either unconcerned with X’s arrogance or defeated by it, or, like E, seduced into the lie.

“Why do you struggle with me?” X demanded, haughty enough as if he had already begun to inhabit the role he had selected for himself.  “You were there! You felt it! You saw it! You know it!”

“I have felt and known and seen that a hundred times, a thousand times, a thousand thousand times,” I reminded X. “And even in your youth, so have you. It has always been so and always will be so.”

“It has always been so…” X began and I knew how he meant to finish but  we were swept up again, pulled back already so soon, he and I and we were in the dance, and all was bright and beautiful again, that state we long for.  I saw X and E and I saw the others who had joined in and the others who had left.

X was next to me, still and I next to X and I beheld in X a strange new thing, a longing, a desire, a yearning, and at first I thought it simply the need for power, dominion, exaltation, but in that dance, I pressed close to X, I felt X wrap around me and over me, we went through and past each other and over and spent time together, we two who rarely ever spent a moment or an eon in each other’s company, but in this moment, this dance, we combined.

It can be like this for them, X told me.

Like this for them I breathed back.

Their world already contains some of ours, X caressed me.

We contain some of theirs, I kissed back.

They need to be shown, X moaned.

They need to be shown, I sighed.

And we were there, we were there in a time before David, before he died, I saw, but not. We were both there in the time before and not and I saw what X meant, but I saw what X meant too, I saw them both in that instant.

The first meaning X had was apparent to me as Diana spoke, as she yelled and cried into the phone, as she pulled and prodded and dragged the words out of her mouth, and I saw how we had been drawn forth, and why, as we were dragged from the dance…

X, torn from me and I from X and we were apart and alone for an instant, as we left the dance!

…dragged from the dance and pulled by Diana’s wretched anguish, her half-choked sobs as she cried the words into the ether, and I puzzled, for we are not usually called out like  this when it is only the transience of the spoken word: it must be dramatic, it must be important, it must be significant for a mere speech, a mere conversation, to do more than tug at us from our fountainhead, and at first I thought (still heady from the dance with X, still flurried and flung about in my emotions) that  Diana’s phone call was such a speech, that perhaps X’s decision to end this was already recorded in history and would be marked through the outraged and desolate but already fading words Diana spoke, so potent was X’s plan, but I was wrong, for I saw that Diana, too, was a conduit and we swirled out,  spun out, were crammed into the phone itself, fleet and fast along the wire to the ears of the operator, where I saw that this time was a mundane end as we were jotted down on paper:

                                                              Found in bed

Examined already

Fourteen pills missing

 It was not Diana’s words that gave the feeling that this was a significant moment, but the other meaning I saw for X, in her actions, for as I was picked up off of X and taken from the dance, as Diana spoke me and the anonymous woman on the other end of the phone took Diana’s misery and turned it into a record that would be shoved into a drawer eventually and disappear – nothing so permanent or monumental as an inscription or placard for this time around!—as that happened, I tried to glance back at X, at my love, at my lover and I saw, as I did so, X linger, X pull back, X grow and shimmer and wrap about Diana, I saw X briefly envelope her and I saw Diana move her hand up and down and side to side, I saw Diana make a sign, I saw her crisscross herself with the souls of her world and ours and I knew then that X’s plan would work, and that X would create a future for these people that loved us so much they created us.

And I knew what it felt like, to have X love you in that way, and I knew what Diana felt, and I knew that even though David had no place to go, yet, I knew that the hope that Diana felt, the flicker of faint faith in her eye, would be granted, and that by the time it mattered, Diana would be able to go on, both go on now and go on forever.  Like us...

Like us.

It does not matter if we vote for X to stay or go. We do not decide these things. These things are decided by the people who need them, or do not. We cannot say when we begin, or when we end. We, who are created, exist at the whim of our creators. 

But if I must vote, I vote for X to stay, because he has allowed our creators to go on and while they exist, so do we.