“Shh, it’s okay,” I whispered soothingly, pressing a piece of gauze firmly against the freshly sown gash at the Hero’s hairline, “Last one, I promise.” This, of course, was a lie; the poor kid had at least half a dozen sluggishly bleeding injuries on him, striping his arms and rending open the bloodstained fabric of his shirt in several places, surely painful despite his apparently unfeeling response. I tutted sympathetically at his glassy, thousand-yard stare, and the way he sat, stoic and detached, unaware of the awed and appreciative back-pats of the milling passers-by or my own gentle ministrations. Clearly, the boy was in shock. 

​

“I’m just going to roll up your sleeve, okay?” I asked softly, not expecting a response, “I’m going to clean these off and see if you need stitches. Let me know if it hurts too much.” 

​

I was trained for this. Years of medical apprenticeship and grueling hours holding crying children in the castle infirmary and countless wringings of blood-soaked linens had taught me to be firm and efficient in a situation like this, but there was a softness to my hands when I handled his wounded arm. The cuts were jagged, brutal; the boy’s final showdown with the Villain was a close call, and the sword-inflicted injuries that marred the otherwise milky pallor of his skin were gruesome enough for even an experienced nurse such as myself to wince. He was just a boy. I wheeled over my little wooden cart of supplies, settling in for a long shift of patient stitches and patches of gauze.

​

Around us, the castle infirmary was a crush of bustling, jostling bodies. The Hero’s army—bandaged and worn-out, but victorious—roamed about in search of friends and family, reuniting with loved ones and mourning the slain. Other nurses were running about, dashing madly to and fro to see to the wounded, but, save for the back-pats and handshakes, everyone left the wounded Hero and I alone; perhaps the shell-shocked silence of their beloved savior scared them away, uncomfortable. Regardless of the reason, I was glad for the relative peace. Carefully, I cleaned the blood and grime off the boy’s arm and began to dutifully bandage the wounds.

​

“Theo!” came a shriek from within the crowd. For the first time since I approached to help him, the Hero’s glassy green eyes showed some sign of recognition. “Theo, thank the Gods, you’re alright!” From the crowd burst a girl, perhaps the Hero’s age, a square of gauze plastered against a wound on her cheek. This, I assumed, must be his Sidekick. 

​

“Sydney,” gasped the Hero—Theo—as she let out a noise like a sob, jostled past me, and threw her arms around her friend. In the wake of her excitement, I stumbled back a step. 

​

“Ow!” I hissed, catching myself against the rickety medicine cart. Startled, I pressed one hand protectively against the swell of my lower abdomen. The pair didn’t seem to notice; they were far too caught up in their happy reunion, tearful at finding one another alive and whole, to notice the presence of an Extra. Us noisy, milling figures in the background tended to pass through the lives of people like them, ghosts shifting through the shadows of their periphery. I didn’t begrudge them for this action; it was, after all, all they knew. 

​

“We did it,” Theo breathed into his Sidekick’s neck, his voice distant and soft with awe, “We did it. We won.”

​

“Yeah,” Sydney laughed wetly, giving him one last crushing squeeze. I resisted the urge to scold her for hurting his arm—I could see the blood welling up again—but after a moment, she leaned back and braced her hands on his shoulders to look him in the eye. “It’s over,” she breathed, “No more fear. No more fighting.”

​

No more monsters with death on their heels and loved ones in their ledger, she didn’t say, No more Villains in the news and teenagers fighting our wars. No more being afraid for our children. This was the end of a nightmare. The end of an era. 

​

The beginning, I hoped, of peace. 

​

 

“So… What now?” 

​

After a few more tearful, extended hugs, the teenagers finally wiped their eyes and finished marveling at their victory. Sydney took a seat in a visitor’s chair beside the cot upon which Theo was perched. She watched lovingly and stroked a thumb against the boy’s limp palm as I cleaned him up and finished bandaging his injuries. For the most part, Theo had been numb and largely unresponsive; I had to physically move him to reach the last cut on his shoulder.

​

Work finished, I sighed. I was practically swaying on my feet after a long shift without adequate food, and the intermittent fluttering in my womb had me equal parts queasy and famished. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the young ones on their own. I fiddled with my medicine cart instead, lingering unobtrusively on the edge of their conversation.

​

“What do you mean?” Sydney asked her friend, smiling up at him indulgently.

​

“What do we do next?” he reiterated, “What’s the next step?”

​

“Oh. Well, let’s see.”

​

Sydney finally let go of Theo’s hand to rummage around in the deep inner pockets of her comically oversized jacket. I watched surreptitiously as she pulled out an old, leatherbound journal, and read over her shoulder when she cracked open the age-worn spine, unnoticed. She flicked past several pages filled with someone’s looping, slanted scrawl, along with little additions in charcoal pencil—careful diagrams under the page Supernatural Aid, a waterlogged section entitled Belly of the Whale, rough sketches under Woman as Temptress—and flipped to the very last page. 

​

“Huh,” she intoned, “The next step is Freedom to Live.” Theo didn’t respond for a long moment; Sydney glanced up at him from the old leather bound journal to see him staring blankly at her, as though expecting her to continue. “That’s it.”

​

“That’s it?” he doubted, his brows knitting in disbelief, “Okay, done. I’m a free man. What comes after that?”

​

“No, Theo, that’s it.” 

​

“That can’t be it. There has to be some other stage after that.”

​

“There isn’t. See for yourself.”

​

She thrusted the journal at him, and he read the last page for himself, his face so close to the aged yellow parchment that the sharp, upturned tip of his nose practically grazed it with every broad, searching sweep. He turned the page. Turned it back. I watched as it dawned on him that his friend was right; there was nothing else. Still, he thumbed through it again from beginning to end, faster and faster as the stages passed by, until he reached where the looping scrawl finished at the very end, where everything ultimately led. Theo started to mutter under his breath as he rifled through the delicate journal once more, this time with such unbridled panic that it made Sydney visibly cringe. 

​

“Careful!” she cried, “That was Campbell’s!” 

​

“He never finished it,” Theo insisted, not meeting her eyes, “He never—He forgot—”

​

“Theo.” Sydney stood to get closer to him, gently easing their late Mentor’s journal from his ironclad grip. She attempted to calm his rising anxiety with a hand on his, solemn. I could see him shaking. “That’s all there is. That’s all he ever wrote. It’s okay. Hey.” She reached tentatively for his chin, emboldened, and made him look at her. When he raised his head, even I could see the dampness of his eyes, his dark lashes beginning to stick and clump into long, wet curls. Some maternal instinct made me want to interject, soothe him with a kiss on the forehead, hold him tenderly to my chest. Instead, I let Sydney blunder through her own reassurance.

​

“It’s okay,” she repeated, “It’s over. We can rest now.”

​

All this did was make him panic more. 

​

“Theo?”

​

“No,” he muttered, “No, no, no, no.” I watched him wrench himself off the cot and make an aborted step away, as though to run, then another back, finding the infirmary too crowded through which to wade, and his path obstructed by myself. “This can’t be it. There was a plan. A system. A whole Journey, written out for us from the beginning, telling us exactly what to do. And now there’s… nothing?” When he turned to face Sydney, and by extension, me, the gently sinking sunlight filtering through the tall castle windows outlined his irises until they were seaglass, iridescent. “You’re telling me there’s nothing?”

​

“Well, yeah. What else should there be?”

​

“You don’t get it.”

​

“Get what?”

​

“What it’s like.”

​

At this, Sydney went still, and I could practically feel the hurt on her face. Theo’s expression changed, too—if there was one thing every non-Hero hated, it was being reminded of our subordinate status in the world.

​

“Right,” she bit out, “This is another one of your Hero things that no mere Sidekick could ever understand.”

​

“I’m sorry,” he hastened to fix. It was sweet of him to try, but the knowing didn’t ever make it better. “But it is. It’s just—I grew up with that stupid journal dictating my whole life, telling me exactly what I had to do, you know? And it’s—I did it all! I did it! I crossed the threshold, I atoned, I fought the bad guys! I did everything right! And now—Now—”

​

“Now it’s over,” Sydney supplied, growing irate, “This should be a good thing! You can do anything at all. Anything you want. Isn’t that wonderful? That there’s a future out there, just waiting for you, and you can do whatever you want with it? Isn’t that what you want?”

​

Theo turned away from his friend, and therefore me, facing the infirmary window overlooking the castle grounds, rolling green hills stretching far into the distance. The setting sun threw the outlines of his face into shades of red and gold, and he was momentarily haloed in an inferno of light. He looked beautiful and tragic and I was just an Extra, a stranger in this boy’s Journey, but I wished he were any other normal boy, someone not burdened with being a Hero, someone else. I wished it so bad I felt dizzy with the wanting.

​

“No one ever told me victory would taste like this,” he said after a long, contemplative silence, and when he turned around again, tear tracks glistened on his cheeks in rivulets of gold, twin streams of ichor. I was blinded and unmoored by the gutted hollowness of his voice. “No one ever said there was nothing at all on the other side.”

​

“Theo… ” Sydney sighed, voice breaking. Sweat beaded at my hairline and slipped down my temple as I braced myself, weak-kneed, against the wheeled cart.

​

“There’s nothing left for me, Syd. Nothing at all.”

​

My knees buckled then, fuzzy shadows swarming my vision, and I cried out as the cart skidded out from under my weight and sent me tumbling, tumbling, to the ground. Before I collapsed, I thought I felt someone’s hands against my arms, someone small and lost and falling, too.

 

​

The boy was holding me when I came to, gently tapping my cheek with a hand as he balanced me tenderly on his lap. In my half-conscious state, I thought it absurdly hilarious that he was caring so dearly for me, when he was the child and I the adult. Sunlight ringed the dark wells of his pupils with a fine line of gold.

​

“Ma’am?” I heard him saying, sound returning to me as though emerging from a deep pool of water, “Are you alright?” I pressed a hand against the swollen bump of my lower abdomen. The baby was moving, agitated, protesting against the sudden shock. Someone pressed a banana into the numb fingers of my hand, ordering me to eat.

​

“I’m fine,” I whispered, and the Hero’s eyes widened and locked onto mine. It was as though he was hearing me for the first time, realizing in awe that the ghosts haunting the edges of his vision all his life were real, tangible beings, solid to the touch just beyond the veil. Slowly, he helped me sit up, and remained crouched beside me, with his arms outstretched to keep me balanced as I swayed. He unpeeled the banana for me. Placed it back in my hand. Pushed it towards my mouth.

​

“You’re a good boy,” I blurted out, unable to control my words despite the embarrassing enormity of my own insignificance, “You’re a good boy. This isn’t how your story ends.” Theo gave me a long, sad smile at that, his eyes soft and verdant in the sundown glare. 

​

“Then how does it end?” he asked. 

​

I had no answer for him. He seemed to know this, too. His eyes shifted again, haunted, distant, a look no child should have to bear. His gaze pierced right through me, rattling in the emptiness like the wind. And all around us, the red light grew.