who we are and all that we're trying to be
There had been days where the shuddering breaths and the tears tucked behind eyes meant gentle caresses and tenderness, a follow through on comfort, on striving to alleviate wounds the world had marked and scorched upon them. All he could now was remain a stony figure on the edges of his grief, on the walls he kept flickering up, but they were weak and damaged, and he couldn’t, wouldn’t reach for her. Not when he wasn’t wanted. Not when everything had decayed and rotted and worn its way through, not when sanctions of who or what he deserved clustered and coiled, choked and smothered. The Sword didn’t know what to do with the apologies, with the layers thrown at him, his hands clenched tightly around the handles of the wagon, wishing once more, that he could be swallowed up by the earth.
And while the argument warring within his worth, his strength, his generosity, prevailed, sticking into his spine, pushing into his ribs, the beast’s recollections simmered, seethed, but gave no voice into the ether other than his own torment. And yet I still was not enough slid against him, grinding and clawing upon the angles in which he’d tried to mend, bend, assuaging until the lacerations were open wide and gaping again. His breath shuddered and he looked down at the ground, at the metal, at the wood, at the cobblestones flanked in snow – colder and colder, never quite understanding why things had come to be this way. At her semblances, he shook his head, eyes only lifting to glance back at her again. “You were.” Until you decided not to be.
Then there were tears, and he stood rigid, frozen as the world he clung to now, still holding onto the wagon, still wondering what he was supposed to do. Heartbreak wasn’t the unknown, because he’d tried and failed times before, but this was too savage, too raw, too damned, searing on the surface of his skin. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to feel. Curling into the shadows, into the brink and bridge of his devastation, of all the fresh injuries, seemed to be the only notion sprung forth in his mind. But -
Perhaps Zuriel had had enough of the moroseness, of the grief, of the anguish and sorrow she knew she’d have to feel and somehow buffer against once more. Perhaps she thought the situation had run its course, and now they were standing in the parallels of their suffering, and the unicorn could bear it no longer. Perhaps she’d thought the distraction worth something – because in all their coiled despondency, the proud equine had wandered off, and now, extended from her maw and into the Swords’ hands, was a doll shaped, hastened, like Ludo.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
