Chapter Text
Valentine Eros knew she was going to die
It was a fact of life, one of the very few certainties afforded by the universe. It probably helped that she wasn't spiritual. She loved her church friends, but she never really believed any of it. Contrary enough, it was comforting not thinking there was anything up there. There was no cosmic force responsible for how the world worked, there was no greater plan, things just. Happened. It was an odd security, that nothing was predestined. There wasn't some grand fate for her.
But if there wasn't some predestined fate, that means that Valentine was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every single choice she had made was hers and hers alone. Every single footstep, every minor decision, meant that she was going to die. There was no sense in wondering what could've been. This was just how it was.
The human body had weird limits. There were stories told of people who demonstrated near superhuman strength in moments of high adrenaline, at a severe cost to their own body. A glass cannon. Valentine’s mother told her some familiar story- when she had been young, her mother had left her alone playing upstairs for a moment, just long enough to go check that the pasta water hadn't boiled over. And in those few moments, on shaky toddler legs, val had clambered over the baby gate and took a flight of stairs head first. Her only lasting injury was a faded scar of a split lip. Something she could only notice in photos up until she was thirteen. It was funny. This same being who was once a fragile baby could tank a fall like that unharmed, and yet, a much more minor accident, onto padded floor, at just the wrong angle, shattered her knee so badly she still limped some days.
Maybe she was prone to falls.
Knowing the extremes of the human body didn't help. This wasn't a flight of stairs or a cushioned mat, this was a canyon, a deep one. There were some things adrenaline couldn't help.
Was this how it was? She had a goldfish when she was ten. She named it Goldie, like every other child did. It was some carnival fish. It lived for a good three weeks. That was her first real brush with death. It wasn't some deeply traumatizing experience. She cried, yes, but she couldn't change it, she had taken care of the fish as best as she could, but she picked it out because it was swimming weird and she felt bad for it. She looked into it when she was seventeen- a swim bladder issue. She couldn't have helped, but she at least hoped the short three weeks goldie spent with her was better than it would've been if the fish had lived in a cramped tank at a carnival.
Did Goldie know what was coming? Was a fish capable of comprehending the fact that it would die? Could a fish know what death would mean for it?
Could Val know what death would mean for her?
How was she any different than that goldfish? She couldn't have known that this bandit chase would've killed her. Nobody could have known. It was nobody's fault, the same way a genetic swim bladder issue was nobody's fault.
Was Sandrock her little fish tank?
Was this her three weeks spent?
Maybe it was. But she wouldn't be mad about it. It was a good three weeks. She was happy. She knew people that made her happy. She had finally stopped being such a shell of herself. She had friends- a lover for light's sake. She was a far cry from the fish in the cramped aquarium at the carnival.
Maybe, when she hit the bottom of this ravine, she’d land gently. She’d managed to hit almost every bush on the way down. Maybe instead of a splat or a crunch, she could be allowed a gentle thud. Something easy to find and recover.
Did she want that? Val had known death was inevitable, so she never put much thought into it. It would always be someone else’s problem to deal with. Someone else fishing her out from behind a little stone castle, laid against a background of technicolor gravel. Or maybe she’d just lay there. Lost to the sands of time. Nestled into her own bed of shale and cactus flowers.
Maybe the light was just a child with good intentions, watching that little blue skimmer net scoop out a lopsided fish and put it into a plastic bag to carry home, with only love in its heart.