You are the night-time fear
Azrael joins them, all smiles and sharp teeth and a scent he knows is there but can't discern anymore. Hay, rich, dry, to lure out the shy deer. Aamu greets the child with a smile of his own, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and as they're all standing there together—something fragile forms inside of him, made of glass, made of ice, made of hopes and sunlight and bitter, deathless ruin.It is love, and it is grief.
It is everything he had, and then didn't have anymore. Still doesn't have he tries to tell himself, again, again, again.
Azrael, bounding around the field and spreading hay, is not his child. It doesn't matter how much they remind him of someone else, a girl three hundred years ago, her fingers braiding his hair and not knowing it would be the last time—
He hadn't known, either.
This. This, right here: it's all he wanted. All he wants. A family outing, Mabel pressing apples into his idle, empty hands as her haunting song goes ever on. His would-be heart overflows, sorrow needling through his veins, a white-hot taint of rage licking his thoughts, and, angrily, he wipes his eyes with the back of a wrist. The smear of reanimation fluids glisten in the starlight.
Neither of them is his dead niece, but in his confusion he can't help but love them as if they are. They've merged and melded in his mind, and it tears him apart: makes him want to scream, raw and ragged, bleeding edges.
Instead he merely turns away, head bowed, shoulders trembling as the fluids splatter darkly onto the snow.
You are the morning when it's clear
AAMU
