You are the night-time fear
He wants to change his mind, hush her, say 'nevermind' and forget about the whole thing. He wants to get up, run far, far away before her cursed answer can make its way past her lips, outrun the distance between her mouth and his ears: disappear like a lightning flash, a ghost that changed its mind on haunting the world.But he can't. He won't. His gentle fiddling with her hair masks how he braces himself within, how afraid he suddenly is: it's one thing to toy with the idea, to acknowledge that it has probably been quite a while, another to actually find out. To get the hard facts laid out on the table.
To get the continuation to that story.
He's not even sure he recognizes the way she refers to this place—the Hollowed Grounds. It's easier to get hung up on that rather than the fact that this place was sectioned off for ...
He keeps working through her hair.
Silent.
"Three..." he starts to say, before abruptly stopping. He doesn't want to go into the implications. He doesn't want to consider the facts. He doesn't want to think about it at all, because he doesn't know what it will do to him.
So he just ignores it. It's a jarring, bizarre and disturbing fact, like static in his veins, behind his eyes, a feeling of his soul stretching, elongating, disappearing in too many directions and not leaving enough Aamu in the middle, not enough to fill out this body, this old, old body—
He pushes it away, again and again, telling her instead the vague ins and outs of what the world was like before. "Maybe," he admits after a moment, lost in a strange, dazzling stream of half-remembered memories. "Maybe not. It's.. difficult, being on the inside. All swept up in what's going on, your own ideas, your own future. There were those who did not agree with us, even before we .. rose up."
(Three hundred—)
"What?" he asks, concerned.
You are the morning when it's clear
AAMU
