It's two in the morning when she is at his widowed wife's bedside, again, patting her back, using a soothing voice, bringing her water, telling her that the lizards are gone, that nothing matters anymore. Nothing matters anymore.

Some people are just born to be strong, her mother had once said. She reminds herself that she is one of them, she has always been, and there's no reason to change that. So she puts up her dams and her walls. He would have wanted it. He would have wanted only happiness for his son and his wife.

She wonders if she was secondary, for a moment, but she quickly throws that thought away. It doesn't matter anymore.

It's two thirty in the morning when with her tailbone aching as she holds a still figure in her lap that the universe feels too big and her time too small.

She's tired, but her experience from the battlefields have strengthened her. The rain patters on the windows and she tries not to feel the choking sensation and taste of blood at the back of her tongue. And when the thunder booms, she pretends that it's not a cannon. It's not a cannon.

It's three fifteen and now she feels that it might be alright for her to go back to her own bed. Slowly, she lifts the frail body out of her lap and covers it with a shroud. A blanket. It's a blanket.

She walks down the dark corridor. While it's a familiar place, it is feels endless without the lights on. Finger bummping over the small indents in the wallpaper, her mind stumbles.

The world will always be a cruel place, no matter how many good things happen, she thinks. The predator preys on the predator, who preys on the predator, who preys on the prey, who preys on the grass. We will all succumb to nature, and nature is harsh.

She whispers something, but she can hardly hear herself as the thunder cadence continues. If he was the lightning, the brilliance one that went out in a flash, she was the thunder that rolls after him. Always after him, always louder, constantly wringing deep screams from the heavens, mourning the electricity that once struck but does no longer.

Why. Why. Why. It's a loaded word that she feels swimming inside of her head, and she wills it to drown. Purpose is a word that strikes an angry chord in her. What purpose? Why would there be a purpose?

It is then that she wishes that the world had been born just a bit closer to the sun.

For one of the only times in her life, she wishes to give up.

She crosses the doorway.

"If there is a God, when I see him, I will kill him."

And she tucks herself in and shuts her eyes, pretending that the monster in the closet isn't there.