These shots don't ricochet

Iskra

BREATHE IT IN, IT'S JUST SNOW, WE'RE JUST FALLING
WE WON'T ALWAYS FREE FALL BACK TO NOTHING

Painful as it was to face her and own up to his selfishness, it was equally terrible not to behold her after all this time. As she settled with him - thank the gods she did - he couldn't help but glance up and meet her gaze. The barest whisper of a smile emerged; the kind that couldn't spread to the eyes because it was too weak, yet was strong enough to overcome the despair and simply exist. Next to him, Goose stared into the curtain of her hair, certain he'd seen movement there. If Iskra saw the beasts too, he did not say, perhaps didn't even consciously realize it, such was the haze the rest of the world had drifted into as Iskra's entire being devoted itself to this moment with her.

Though it was a brief moment of respite before she spoke and damaged him all over again, it was long enough for Iskra to notice that she wasn't exactly the way he remembered. The features of her face were different in ways he couldn't quite place, as if just a single crease from laughter or sunlight had been undone. Were he more trained in music, he might recognize that the lilt of her speech wasn't the one that played around his head at night; just a music box of memories playing marginally off-key, the result of being dropped one too many times most likely.

Ah, but what won't a decade do to change a person, all the while each memory is just a duplication of the last time you remembered it, steadily decaying into nothing more than a fantasy your mind was tricked into believing was reality.

The whisper died under her honesty - no joy could exist in him now.

"It felt like I was," he admitted quietly, frowning as he glanced down at the table once more. "Sometimes, it still feels that way." A haggard sigh shuddered through him, and it seemed to carry a visible weight as Iskra's body slackened in its absence, becoming a crumpled husk in that chair. He grew quieter still.

"I lost so much of myself when she..." his mouth was too dry to hold his tongue anymore. Where even did that damn appendage normally go? It seemed impossible now to have it in there, and his throat, was it too narrow now to breathe? Gods, why was the fire so hot suddenly? Iskra wiped his palms on his pants.

"She died Mel."
He found some morsel of strength and looked back up at her, his eyes falsely bright with saline. He had not spoken of...any of this. He'd just run, run and buried it so deep it had nowhere to go but inside of him to rot.

"She died and I couldn't face it. I couldn't face this world without her and I couldn't face how angry I was that she left me like that." Iskra's eyes flashed as he leaned closer, his clammy hand an abrupt fist on the table, teeth gritted into a sneer as the boy sobbed about his damn mother and the shitshow that he'd experienced growing up. All the while, blind to how he'd been no kinder to her in the end.

I'M JUST STARTING TO LEARN
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN CHASING GHOSTS