A heartbeat suspends us, waiting for a solitary breath to unleash the torrent.

The pulse of a drum resounds from the depths, intensifying. Time stills, torturously slow.

The weapon slices the air.

The lug wrench draws blood at the point of contact. Dark red mists the night, coating the fabric of time in a thick, cloying film and scenting the air with iron and violence.

Wellington stumbles off-kilter and touches his temple before he goes down.

Against the darkened backdrop of the lot, a cosmic divide between heaven and hell ripples at the seams, painting the canvas of this plane with impassioned strokes of hematic red.

Her strangled cry splits the ozone to propel me forward, and when I finally reach her, I drop to my knees.

Racked with tremors, she grips the lug wrench as she struggles to heave in a breath, her light hazel eyes unblinkingly lost at the damage spread on the ground before her. Her hair is wild and escapes the band holding it back. Flecks of blood spatter her face like the curry I can taste imbuing the air between us.

I dare to take her face between my palms. My entire body pulses, lit with the electric current of the sun from this first touch. I turn her unseeing gaze on me.

Her pupils are blown, shock and panic coursing through her system as her pulse fires against my fingers.

“Breathe,” I command, and her mouth parts as she gasps air into her lungs. “That’s it, come back to me. Come back to me.”

She locks on to my gaze, staring almost through me, but a sliver of lucidity begins to crest in her shimmering eyes. The hazy lampposts cast the scene in a sickly orange, making the moment feel surreal, outside of us, yet I know neither of us have ever been more present.

She drags in another unsteady breath, my touch anchoring her to me, as I shift my gaze to the body sprawled on the greenery of the parking lot. A ridge of thick shrubbery conceals us from the media building. The conference ended hours ago, leaving the university grounds empty, but we won’t be cloaked for long.

A fierce desire to protect her from what’s coming wars with my raging sense of self-preservation. I’ve never experienced a desire more demanding. It’s pure fucking torture.

It’s goddamn bliss.

In the midst of life we are in death.

“Media vita in morte sumus,” I murmur, my tone as fragile as this moment woven between us by Athena herself.

She still hasn’t spoken a word, yet I read every raging emotion in her eyes. I’ve never feared anything, not even my own sadistic father, but confronted with the threat of losing her, I’m fucking terrified.

As I reluctantly release her, I take in the blood staining my palms. Her sin made mine. Her eyes absorb the sight, and she shivers. I quickly remove my suit jacket and drape it around her trembling shoulders. As if coming out of a trance, she pulls the lapels tight, her delicate fingers depositing blood on the fabric, and I think about how those same delicate hands just caved Wellington’s temporal bone.

A groan disturbs our solitude. Of course, Wellington is much too insolent, demanding attention even in death. He can’t simply die in peace. Ironic, seeing as how he constantly lectured on the subject.

Kneeling in front of me, she startles, thrust into the present. “He’s alive.”

“But should he be?”

The thought leaves my mouth unfiltered. Her fine eyebrows draw together as if she’s sorting and weighing the answer to that question within herself.

“Here,” I say, snapping up his wrist. “Grab his other arm. He can’t be left here.”

A few seconds of hesitation pass before she says, “We shouldn’t move him.” She glances around the deepening night. “I have to call this in.”

Operating on instinct, she pushes to her feet, her movements shaky. I still have Wellington’s limp wrist clutched in my hand, his pulse unsteady beneath my fingers, as I watch her drive her fingers into her dark hair. The unruly streak of white becomes tinged with red. It falls across her eye, lodging a fierce need in me to sweep the length behind her ear.

Much too large for her, my jacket hangs on her shoulders. She holds the collar so she can grab a phone from her back pocket, but she only stares at the dark screen. Then she begins to search the ground.

“Shit,” she mutters as her search becomes frantic.

I’m in no rush to get Wellington help. I could watch this goddess all night, listen to her softly muttered curses and desperate gasps for breath until the end of time, but there’s a man bleeding out on the ground, and soon someone will call for help.

I glance at the bastard near my feet. “Plans change, Percy.” As cautiously as I can, I stand and approach her. “We need to move him.”

“No, I need to find it,” she says, her voice raspy and broken, which reminds me of his hands around her throat.

Reflexively, my hand clenches into a fist. I’m a volatile substance heated too quickly as I search the ground and swipe up a ring of keys.

“Here.” I tuck the keys in her palm, closing her fingers around the solid objects.

She stares vacantly at our clasped hands, then finally removes hers from mine to slip the keys into the bag at her hip. “Thank you.”

I trap her face between my palms again, flames licking my viscera at the feel of her soft skin. “We have to move him,” I say. “Now.”

She stares back at me, long lashes framing her light eyes that reflect the stars, and I swear if she asked me to light myself on fire right now, I’d strike a match.

Mercifully, she nods against my hold. No other words are spoken as I reluctantly release her and we heft the drunk and battered professor and lug him across the shadows of the campus.

I make sure to grab the weapon.

My thoughts are a snarl of hypotheticals, an infinite number of paths stretched before us, each one littered with too many unknown variables. Forced to select one, I take the path which leads us into the dim interior of Wellington’s lecture hall, where I let him drop to the lacquered hardwood.

Despite the dire circumstance, a fiendish smile tips my mouth. Wellington’s insult to me during his speech now feels more like a trivial afterthought. Casting a critical look down on his bloodied face, I no longer see a rival, if he ever was much of one from the start.

“Who’s the washed-up charlatan now?”

“You know him,” she says to me, and I note an undercurrent of accusation layered beneath.

I sink my hands into the depths of my pockets. The subtle glow of bookcase lamps is the only source of light, casting the classroom like a darkened stage.

“Unfortunately,” I tell her honestly. “He’s a professor of philosophy here, but more of a hack.”

She paces a few steps, then turns to face me. “Who are you?” she demands.

I lift my chin, the weight of her question met with a host of conflict and friction.

The only certainty I know is, since my first touch, I won’t be able to keep my hands off her. I’ve never felt such a compulsion to enmesh myself in another person. She’s become a part of my state of being. Entanglement theory on a cellular level, entwining us with an epic origin story.

Plato’s Symposium states humans were once whole beings that, due to the gods’ fear and envy, were severed in half. One made two.

When one finds their soul mate, they will cleave to them, will abandon all else to be with their other half. Where, in the throes of passion, their need to satiate an endless desire, they will starve and wither in each other’s embrace.

Stale philosophers can argue whether or not Plato actually believed in the concept of soul mates, or if the myth was delivered by a comic as satire.

I’d vainly argue that no one spouts such passion, such fervor, only to dismissively sweep it aside. If Plato ever entertained this belief, then the proof may lie in such a verse: