In the rain or with tears—

She's missing (somewhere out there in the spring's cool rain, erringly childlike, doll-like in her ruffled silk mini-dress), missed, a wayward child-mother. Underneath the setting sun that turns the sky with colors that herald the memory of fire, all the weeping willows by the stream are sighing, and the two cast shadows that are far too long behind them as if to measure the insidious depth of the secrets they both keep.

It's like a dream: the two of them there wet under the tender spring shower, blackhaired children that have been forfeited to some silent cause, so lost that neither can find themselves; irreclaimable souls. Jill is in a drug-addled haze — her mirrors are powdered white, framed with razorblades and rolled up hundred dollar bills, and she's been drinking expensive vodka for weeks to dampen the viper's bite of stress. But she's beautiful, so beautiful, too beautiful; her triumph is her disgrace.

"I sent him far away; he's looking in the deserts for you, Medina this time. He won't buy this circle game for too much longer and I don't even want to think about the repercussions," she whispers, just loud enough to be heard above the pelting of the gentle downpour, and he closes his eyes at the sound of her voice—slowly, slowly for it's spellbinding, as pleasurable to the ears as the milksilk white of her unsullied skin is to the touch, pure silver twining in the ether. "I shouldn't be lying to him after everything that's happened. I'm a stupid girl."

"He's a fucking dumbass and I'm a fast mover, he'd never know the difference," he dismisses, leaning long against the tree where they have taken shelter. It's her cigarette that he smells first, but below that, the sudden headiness of her perfume. Vera Wang's Rock Princess instead of Cinéma or Obsession now—the succulent meat of white peach, hypnotic heliotrope, night-blooming jasmine, delicate lily, a chorus of spice that his senses cannot quite place but it's sultry, unique, almost poetic. "Why then? Why lie for me, Jill? How does this serve you?"

He regrets the last question almost immediately because he knows her, and he knows her better than that, knows she can be better than that. When he slits one eye, he sees her under that half-shadow of the drooping tree and her face reveals a few of her secrets to him one cracked diamond at a time—it's a little sad, blended with an innocent confusion that borders on helplessness, some personal shame. It's a shapeless dress, nearly, but small enough that he can see where she curves or hollows out now that she's wet, and her bible-black hair is everywhere, beginning to lose its curl under the newfound weight of the moisture it carries.

One hand, she holds furled up against the breastbone, and the other is folded over a cigarette to keep the fire hot by her lavish, lush-soft mouth that glistens pale red from where she was stroking her little pink tongue nervously over it. "Why did you do it? Why did you kill all those people? Children and women, so indiscriminately? I try not to think about what you did out there, Zion, and I can't breathe when I do."

At first, he says nothing—it's hard for him when he sees the unshed tears, tears that she would never allow to completely break through, and he can see that it is difficult for her to not judge him, condemn him, for the savage wolf that he is. Jill is unintentionally doe-eyed, the kohl shadow smudged and trickling down in not-tears, but how wounded she is when she looks at him like that makes him ache hard in places he forgot that he had.

"I didn't— I thought— I didn't know for sure that I wouldn't be able to control it when it came into me," he bites out with some difficulty for he knows how easy it would be to lie to her, but he doesn't want to anymore (unless he feels he has absolutely has to.) "But I murdered a slew of men before that, I was driven and I did what I needed to do in order to get to him, Jill. You don't understand. You don't know him like I do. It's been coming to this for years, you can't stop him and you can't stop me, you can't stop us. One of us has to die, me or him, and this doesn't end until—"

"If you could just— if you could change your mind, maybe I could convince him to stop this, you could both just live and— why can't—"

"No. It's him or me, Jill, why can't you understand that?"

"I can't choose— you can't— this hurts me, don't you care that this hurts me, I know you care that this hurts me, why can't that be enough?"

And she is crying now, silent and slow the darksmear dribble down the high, delicate bones of her cheeks, tries to smoke though her deceptively diminutive fingers quiver from the emotion. Turns halfway so that he can't watch her do it, but still he comes to fold his hands moistly around her shoulders, attempts to comfort her even while his words sharpen themselves like knives.

"Me or him. Why is that so hard for you?"

"Because the world needs someone like him, but I can't let you go—I can't let go."