EVIE
He steps closer, and she lowers her shield further and to the side, not wanting to seem closed off when his welcome is eternal. The offer isn’t unexpected. Deimos is no iceberg, no matter how some may perceive his demeanor, and she knows he would understand far better than most what she has gone through. The Grounds, leadership, solitude, loss, war. None of it foreign to him.
Her eyes drift sideways to the dead Ursur, which she hadn’t dared to touch after the revelation at the waterfall, needing a moment away from his keen gaze to gather her courage. Funny that she needs to find that bravery to do something like being vulnerable.
“I dream of Sam a lot,” she confesses softly, shield limp at her side. “I hear him calling for me. Begging for my help, for me to save him from Gideon, or The Voice, or sometimes Amalia.” The lost sister that had been taken and turned from a shield to a sword, meant to dispose of the Ascended threat - their own shared brother. “And every time I’m never strong enough to save him, and my healing has never worked on Ascended - I try over and over, but the wounds never close. And every time I’m left holding him, feeling how wrong his body felt beneath my hands when Wessex brought him to me.” Her words begin to hasten as hot tears prickle at her eyes, staring somewhere into the blank white of the tundra, seeing things that aren’t really there. “Sometimes I start to feel my own body doing the same. Going hard and cold and wrong and I can’t pull away but it’s taking me too. And then I wake up and have to remember how to be human again.” Like a demented twin’s empathy, chasing the stretch of ligaments instead of the oiled spin of fluid and bio-mechanics, trying to stop feeling like she was being turned to parts.
“I wasn’t enough of a fighter to keep him safe, but I wasn’t enough of a healer to bring him back either. I can’t…I - what if I’m not enough again, despite all our training?” Weak words, her mother would have called them. ‘What if’. She can hear the poisonous tone as if it were being whispered in her ear that very moment, and Evie knows it’s a ridiculous fear without hearing it in her mother’s tongue. A vague future should not bring her so low, but she can’t unburden herself of this keen, heartbreakingly failure; the inability to save her twin.
Her eyes drift sideways to the dead Ursur, which she hadn’t dared to touch after the revelation at the waterfall, needing a moment away from his keen gaze to gather her courage. Funny that she needs to find that bravery to do something like being vulnerable.
“I dream of Sam a lot,” she confesses softly, shield limp at her side. “I hear him calling for me. Begging for my help, for me to save him from Gideon, or The Voice, or sometimes Amalia.” The lost sister that had been taken and turned from a shield to a sword, meant to dispose of the Ascended threat - their own shared brother. “And every time I’m never strong enough to save him, and my healing has never worked on Ascended - I try over and over, but the wounds never close. And every time I’m left holding him, feeling how wrong his body felt beneath my hands when Wessex brought him to me.” Her words begin to hasten as hot tears prickle at her eyes, staring somewhere into the blank white of the tundra, seeing things that aren’t really there. “Sometimes I start to feel my own body doing the same. Going hard and cold and wrong and I can’t pull away but it’s taking me too. And then I wake up and have to remember how to be human again.” Like a demented twin’s empathy, chasing the stretch of ligaments instead of the oiled spin of fluid and bio-mechanics, trying to stop feeling like she was being turned to parts.
“I wasn’t enough of a fighter to keep him safe, but I wasn’t enough of a healer to bring him back either. I can’t…I - what if I’m not enough again, despite all our training?” Weak words, her mother would have called them. ‘What if’. She can hear the poisonous tone as if it were being whispered in her ear that very moment, and Evie knows it’s a ridiculous fear without hearing it in her mother’s tongue. A vague future should not bring her so low, but she can’t unburden herself of this keen, heartbreakingly failure; the inability to save her twin.
Don't look up, just let them think
There's no place else you'd rather be
There's no place else you'd rather be
