RORY
Wessex—capable, ferocious, lonely Wessex—stepped over the threshold and past him into his house. For a couple of seconds he was left where he was, looking questioningly at the door, as if wondering why it wasn't closing by itself. Something was shifting inside of him, waking up in a very undignified way, more like goring your eyes out by accident rather than rubbing them sleepily.Reaching out to close the door was the simplest thing in the world, but he knew that the moment he moved to do it, he would be pulled back from the edge, back into the light. Ceasing to function when you were alone wasn't hard.
Ceasing to function with someone else around you was.
He stayed in his misery for a couple of seconds longer, staring abjectly at the familiar wood grains and patterns. He heard Wessex bustle around behind him. And he thought of how Long Night should've gone: him and Wessex and Amalia, safe behind their blackout panels, talking in hushed voices in front of a flickering fire. Sharing the apple cakes he and Amalia had made. Finding out all the little things, how badly they fit together, but how friendship could make it work.
Instead .. all of this—
Rory reached out. His hand, paler than usual from the cold, pressed against the wood. It closed without a groan, without a creak, testament of how this was the first night since Long Night.
And thus, his spell was broken. He was acutely aware of everything that was wrong with him, everything he had not done, the ghosts in his eyes.
Wessex had a small, happy fire on the way. He drifted closer to her, but said nothing. Merely watched as she fed the thing, until it was big enough to lick along the logs and take hold and not be discouraged into fading out.
He looked at her, surprisingly steadily, though there wasn't much of him behind his gaze. He seemed tired; forlorn; less, somehow, as if his colors had washed out. When she spoke, his gaze gravitated away, and he contemplated what to do. What to say. It had been a long time since anyone took care of him in such a hands-on way, and he felt ashamed that he even needed it.
"No," he finally admitted, his voice brittle. Slowly, he began to head towards.. somewhere, a door perhaps. "I might have some cured meat around..." His voice trailed off and his fingers hovered over the counter as he stopped. Gods, did he really not know what he had in his own house?
He knew that he had meat and apple cake in the cold storage, but that was frozen.
He touched the tips of his fingers to the counter, and bowed his head.
'Before Long Night' seemed like a lifetime ago.
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
