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To be loved is to be ruined, Blue discovers, the snap of poison unfurling in her veins.
To love is to accept that ruination, fall headfirst into it. To love is to dig claws into your own chest and drag out your heart, offer it up for destruction.
She's walked a thousand strands, a thousand worlds and variations, and learned a thousand different definitions of love. She knows love, for some, is softness, is companionship, is growing old together. There is a part of her that aches for that aspect, even now, even with cold sweat running down her skin, the salt of it on her tongue, the taste of Red's betrayal. A part of her that pictures a little house, a garden not of Garden, a pet, a sunrise.
She knows love, for others, is unmaking, and that's closer to the truth of them, after all. To be made and unmade, unmade and remade into a new shape, that is what it has been to love Red, to be loved by her.
And also, love is ruin.
It is not just the ruin she faces now, the certain end of it, a betrayal she would take a hundred times over the empty days that stretched, without Red's words. It's not just the pain that shakes through her, the pain a part of her delights in, Red's words unspooling in her veins. It's not just the cold sweat, the ache in her back teeth, the silent grief of knowing this will be the last there is of Red for her.
Love has ruined her a hundred times, a hundred ways. Ruined her perception of what was, of what should be. Ruined her path forward, thorny and tangled but somehow sure.
Love has ruined her as a soldier, heart turned traitor, Blue turned purple. Love has turned her into her enemy's greatest triumph, the snap in her veins proof of victory, of magnificent betrayal, an ending she would choose a dozen times over just to have lived the days before it, to have experienced the wild biting thrill of Red, of love.
Love has ruined her as an agent, let her fall headfirst into a trap, let her close its claws around her willingly.
Love, perversely, has ruined her as a lover. She has found it harder, these last years, to sink into the role of it, embed herself deep in the strand as part of someone's life. It's not that she has not done it – she has been a good man's wife, a bad woman's bedfellow, a dozen other variations on the concept to a dozen other people – but she has found herself doing it and thinking of Red. Of what it would be like, to share those lives with her, instead.
Or at least, she has found herself cataloguing every detail of these others, not for work, but for letters, for sharing with Red, so that by crafting them in her own head, Red might trace the outline of her, too. Might imagine skin Blue has touched, might touch her, too, in some measure, in words and fantasy, in beestings and the thorns of a rose.
Love has ruined her as many things, and made of her many others, and she has taken it all gladly.
She takes this last ruin, too, the twist of Red in her veins, the closest they will ever get. Lets herself revel in that, in the hours Red must have spent crafting this last weapon; her hands, her eyes, on this same thing Blue has touched. Her work in Blue's veins, Blue's death in her hands, the unbearable, delicious intimacy of Red being her ending. Sweat runs from her skin, pain tears through her veins, there is an ache in her teeth and a bitter sweetness on her tongue, and all of it is Red's.
Killing and loving, betrayal and closeness, none of them are that different, after all.
Neither, then, creation and destruction, ruination and rebirth. Red created and destroyed her, ruined and healed her, all at once.
To love is to be ruined, for Blue. Maybe, for Red, to love is to ruin, to betray. Maybe she crafted every centimetre, every taste, every berry; every sweat drop, every ache, every tremor in Blue's hands; all of them, with love.
There's a twisted honour in it, in being her victim, her victory, in having claimed so much of her thoughts as to earn a customised death, a last letter laced between every bite.
Blue held her heart out to Red and said ruin me, and Red took it and did so, and Blue cannot find it in herself to regret.
Count self-preservation, then, count the urge to win, count belief in war, count all of them as further casualties of love.
To love, to ruin, to be loved and to be ruined. The only hope she has, as she writes her last letter, as she seals it, as she feels the ending rushing on, is that a little of Red has been ruined by her, too. Ruined and remade, healed and broken, created and destroyed. A little of all of it, in Red as it is Blue. In purple, perhaps, she thinks, and tries to laugh.
Her end rushes closer. And she takes it, takes all of it, falls headfirst into ruin, into love.