Everyone Needs to Die

Years start to blur, the same ways days do, melding together once they become all just the same. The human brain can’t compensate for memories like that. So the years blur like he imagines the days used to. One into the other, differentiated by eras and events rather than dates.

There’s the Maggie Era. That's a good one. A first love, before the enhancement, when things were simple and he was just a soldier in the war with a girl back home.

(Things changed. Things always change. He’s helpless to stop them.)

Then the Maggie Era melded into the Maggie-and-Jason Era. A little boy after himself, held in his mother’s arms, his father’s. Things were good. But then he was pulled aside by their private little government project, and he was helpless to resist.

Suddenly Noah was immortal. He watched his wife and son grow, while he didn’t. He watched the wrinkles form and the bones break and the graves fill. It was after Jason’s funeral that the years began to blur.

Then came Elaine. Elaine was a good time, be it short. She was well after the war. A freak accident took her, and before he really had time to grieve, he was carted off for the next war. Middle East, where he lost more brothers than before. Where the word “brother” actually meant something. That was the saddest era of all, he thinks, and tries to forget it for the most part.

There was Angelica about a hundred years later. He made the same mistake he swore he wouldn’t make after Jason; then came little Ariel, followed by Henry.

As always, he watched them. He watched them grow old.

They watched him grieve them before they were dead. He grieved life.

It’s some forty years after Angelica that he finds himself asking for death. And it’s not like he’s incapable of death, no, a super soldier is still sentient, and he knows it would be possible to catch a stray bullet or jump on a bomb to save his soldiers.

So he does.

He never dies.

After his first… obvious attempt, is when he’s assigned Cody. Cody is his bodyguard. Cody, the most dangerous woman he’s ever met, who’s certainly more deadly than himself. Sure, he’s halfway to bulletproof, and can run twice as fast as anyone ever recorded, but the woman at his side could probably take him out with a paperclip.

But despite her insane workout routine and her distaste for seafood, Noah Hart can no longer be Noah Hart without Cody McKnight trailing behind.

Her job description is his bodyguard. But she’s not there to protect him from enemies, not really. She’s there to protect his gaze from the weapon’s hold, and his wandering hands from the chemistry lab where there are more deadly chemicals to cause instant organ failure than anywhere else in the world. She’s there to protect Noah Hart from himself.

He hates her job. She does too.

“Why?” she asks once, in a quiet bar at six a.m. after a particularly close call.

I have three children, he wants to yell. Amazing wives. Brothers in arms who I’ve watched die too early. Every time, it’s too early.

But that isn’t what he says. He simply tells her, “Everyone needs to die, Cody.” He downs another shot like it’ll affect him. He hasn’t been drunk in decades. Centuries. “When you don’t, everyone else does. One can only watch death for so long.”

She sticks a little closer to him that night.

He thinks it’s about a year later, now. It’s fall. Maggie loved fall, loved the colors and the chill. He never really cared, but he takes it upon himself to stare at the trees briefly.

“I’ll be close,” Cody tells him. She leaves the car to lead him out, and with a brief hug, turns around.

Her hands shake. Noah pretends not to notice.

(His do too, and Cody pretends the same. She pretends not to ask why they’re at a cemetery even though Noah has denied talking about his past since she’s known him. She doesn’t pretend very often.

But she pretends not to notice him slip her firearm from it’s holster.)

His steps are heavy in the morning grass. Elaine likes mornings best, and was always a morning person. She would tell him she liked to see the sunrise, and the dewy grass. He takes a moment longer to take in the smell of the wet ground.

He insisted his family all be buried together, even hundreds of years apart. The plot was bought in his father’s name so many hundreds of years ago now, and he hopes he’ll be buried here, someday, too.

There are begonia’s long dead by Angelica’s grave. He placed them there some months ago, when the ground was warm and they may have still survived. He knew she would have loved them, ever the gardener. 

Jason is buried by his mother. Ariel and Henry by theirs. He’ll be placed right beside Maggie, on the left. He doesn’t want to be remembered. He wants to have an unmarked grave, quiet, by his family. They’re the only ones that matter anymore.

He placed in his will, the one he just had notarized last summer, that Cody should have access to all of his things. She can do whatever she so pleases with them, he really doesn’t care. But he adds that she has control over the plot he’s standing on now, and hopes, distantly, that she might be buried here too someday, beside him on the other end.

He’ll be dead first, he knows. He won’t watch another person die without him.

The gun trembles— or is that his hand? It’s loaded, he knows, and the safety switches off. He’s been around so many weapons in his life that the cocking of the glock doesn’t phase him. It doesn’t phase him, not as he sits, not as he places the barrel against his temple.

He can nearly feel Cody’s gaze and catches a glance of her behind him. She doesn’t speak.

He takes one last look at the colorful leaves, the dead flowers, feels the dew seeping through his pants. Noah pictures their faces, all of them in front of him again. He hopes all of his families get along. 

Soon he’ll be there with them. He can finally move on, with them, this time. He can be free for the first time in centuries.

He smiles. A gunshot rings out, and there’s no screaming, no bombs, no war. Just the dull thud as he hits the ground.

Cody’s hand slips into his, she whispers in his ear, and he knows he should be dead, but isn’t. He doesn’t really even feel the pain, just his consciousness slipping away.

His head is in her lap. Cody brings him close.

“Rest,” she tells him softly. “Rest, Noah.”

Because everyone needs to die.