Tristan stood stunned, struck senseless by the sudden surge of savage intention. The gun was in his hands - [i][color=82ca9d]shaking hands[/color][/i] - and leveled at the cop-killer's chest, but he hadn't fired. Not during the rush and not now, as the other approached the group.

He couldn't pull the trigger.

[color=708090][i]I have told you all that it is inevitable. You have made your stance clear, in response. That will delay several important events, for you. Events which would prove beneficial to your understanding.[/i][/color] Her thoughts in his mind, whirling around his own, strong and dark and strange by contrast. The gun - [i][color=82ca9d]the gun? [/color][/i][color=82ca9d]My[i] gun[/i][/color] - swung towards her, the way he imagined his ancestors might have held knives of stone out towards [i]Smilodon fatalis[/i]. Well, maybe not [i]his[/i] ancestors. The people who felt the way he felt now, Tristan thought maybe they didn't do a lot of surviving and reproducing, as a rule. Would he? He tightened his grip. [color=708090][i]Fire if you wish.[/i][/color] What did he wish for?

He couldn't pull the trigger.

Tristan's hand fell limp to his side. He looked around, eyes wild, lost, at faces familiar and otherwise. At Officer Keahi, bleeding out on the tracks, just like the Ghost Girl wanted. Just like she wanted, more people were down there now. Just let death take you, and you'll be given something extraordinary. [color=82ca9d][i]If there's anything in the world I wish for, it's not to understand.[/i][/color] Loneliness, hunger, frustration, rage, a loss...he looked at Tabitha, waiting for the train. Faithful. Fateful.

That broke and scattered him, and for a moment he was ten years old again, the first time he'd seen a miracle. It was his baptism. His father had taken him by the head and shoved him under the water of the huge ceremonial tub, the trembling sweetness of the hymn they'd sang for him still echoing in his ears. His father's eyes on his, so powerful, so knowing, detached from the flow of things. [color=82ca9d][i]The Ghost Girl's eyes are the same.[/i][/color] He remembered one of the women from the choir - not his mother, no, that little lamb would not bray or kick then or at world's end - had started forward, into his field of vision, and he remembered that her face had been changing. He hadn't seen what it had changed into, because right about then he'd run out of air and started to move, when his father simply moved his hand down and wrapped it around Tristan's throat.

At this point Tristan began to panic and to fight.

The woman was gesturing, maybe shouting. He couldn't hear and his thrashing made the water an opaque chaos, affording glimpses only when his desperate struggle brought him near - never through - to the surface. He'd struggled and shoved at his father's arm, which was immobile, impossible, a pillar of the temple descended to crush the life from him according to some higher ordination. And the woman had rushed forward, screaming - he heard a little of that - and without ever taking his eyes from Tristan's the older man had simply reached out with his other arm and taken her throat as well, and then it was she and Tristan together, two wild beasts strangling in the grip of divine judgment. She was clawing ruby slivers from his forearm and Tristan had his whole being set against that one limb, but his father never flinched or shifted. No human force could have altered him in any way. The black had closed in, a killing circle, and he'd felt his life slipping out of him like sand from a broken hourglass, taking his mind with it, perhaps his soul. But it was there in that moment of deepest despair that Tristan realized what his father was looking at, that it wasn't a judgment, that in fact Tristan didn't matter at all. The self-made messiah of the Way of Light was not looking at him but through him, to something only he could see. The end of his path, upon which every act of love and violence, every moment that passed at all, was another thundering and inevitable step. Tristan was merely a window looking in upon that end. Something was waiting there, something his father never took his eyes off of.

Tristan couldn't be sure, but later he thought it maybe looked like a throne.

And that was the miracle. Revelation at death's door. He'd been rebellious and cynical and worldly because his father was a man and the church was his world, but he'd been wrong. A man could not hold two beasts of the world and break them in his hands, could not deny them all their aims and remain untouched by their terror and need. His father really was God, or God was in him, or some other immaterial transposition of human and divine. In that moment he'd understood that the power of life and death was held over him, the power that separated Heaven from Earth, and so too was his father separate from him and from all of them. Tristan's lungs screamed with far-off, fading pain, but his father had never felt pain, could not feel teeth or fingernails now. He had only ever felt his own power, and was invincible in it. He was the Way of Light, and life and breath and all other things were through him and him alone.

It had taken nine hard battering years to break the faith Tristan found there, that had been crushed down into the core of him by those calloused unbreakable hands.

And now God had found him again, astray and afraid, and brought him to this place to show him, once more, the power of life and death. The dying officer, the bleeding killer, the unconscious artist, the scientist and the believer, the uncertain, the strong, they were all...the tableau took on mythic dimensions for Tristan, a painting of the Last Supper, and at the center was the Ghost Girl with her otherworldly eyes. He had run so far to make it to this place, to close this killing circle. One more game, one more test of faith. [color=82ca9d][i]I don't want to understand.[/i][/color] [color=708090][i]Events which would prove beneficial to your understanding.[/i][/color] [color=82ca9d][i]'For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.'[/i][/color] [color=708090][i]Such a gift does not come without expectations.[/i][/color] [color=82ca9d][i]What kind of story is this?[/i][/color] [color=708090][i]The train is coming, after all.[/i][/color] He looked down at the - at [i]his[/i] gun. The power of life and death. Beyond pain, beyond reach. Faithful. Fateful. [color=708090][i]Fire if you wish.[/i][/color]

He couldn't pull the trigger.

[color=708090][i]The truth is invariable.[/i][/color]

He couldn't pull the trigger?

[color=82ca9d]"Fuck that,"[/color] Tristan said. He looked towards the Ghost Girl. Maybe she didn't see him, maybe she only saw the end of her path, but that was alright - he didn't see her either. It was something else he spoke to. [color=82ca9d]"Fuck you,"[/color] he said, and put his gun in his mouth, and was gone.