some lives read like poetry, others like cacophany

MELITA

Melita would prefer to wage it all out too, but she was trying her best through the blinding, blistering wake of frustration, narrowing her breaths down to long, slow rhythms. Maybe they’d never understand each other again. Maybe they were simply talking in circles and spirals, and it wouldn’t matter in the end, both dedicated to their portion of the stories and sides. Maybe one would listen and the other would not, and it would change sporadically, and still bear no weight. Perhaps it had been reckless to open doors to save others – but Wessex hadn’t been there. Damned to be condemned in her thoughts and opinions, and so the girl shrugged away the notion of passwords, of privilege (gods, they were privileged to be saving lives – was that what’d it been? A collection of people who’d worked and thrived and strived, who’d sung to luxere, who’d beckoned their powers to offer sanctums and sanctuaries?) The second realm of shelter hadn’t even clambered into her mind until theirs burned down – so she shrugged it all away, her eyes on shadows contorting along the spines of books, on the letters she could no longer make out, on places she’d rather be.

I hear you shuffled towards her, closing in, and the girl shifted her weight, a fight or flight mode scratching somewhere along her surface, under her skin, in her limbs. Did she really want to know? Earlier it hadn’t held any merit – because no one had died while they suffered, while they waged and wreaked havoc, while they were smothered and consumed by something they couldn’t fight. Hadn’t Phoebe tried to find cures? Hadn’t so many of them put their efforts into discovering the hows and whys? And the cause had been staring them in the face. Her eyes flickered back to the Wraith’s, flinty, ready to ignite. “I have always strived to help and defend others. And I attacked them instead. I had no control. I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t care.” It’d gone against all her principles – and then she’d been left to wonder if that, that barbaric, brutal, eldritch little soul, had been everything she’d ever been trying to hide.

But Wessex would do it all over again, and that was all she needed to hear. The youth couldn’t tell if it was disappointment bounding in her chest or something else altogether; no name in the emotion, in the twisted paradigms between them now. Fangorn nudged at her ankle, and she lifted her lantern again, turning and shifting along the opus of darkness, the little panes of light far more dignified than she’d ever be.

help tonight to split its seams
Give the bruises out like gifts