I can see for miles, miles, miles

He needs to go home but he doesn’t. Instead he’s in the Meadow… He’s looking for his father’s corpse. Something solid to make the lines stop blurring. Something that will show him that he did indeed kill Magnus or that it had just been another trick from the Dark Torturer. Of course only one gold flecked eye remains to look, the other cruelly ripped from it’s socket and leaving only an empty hole behind. An empty black hole with three long wounds grazed from top to bottom. He was a disfigured man, mutilated for the rest of his days. His flank aches where Carnage had left his brand, still fresh and bleeding in it’s Ursa Major shape, lines connecting to large dots. A mockery the Star God had left on his flesh.

She has cleaned herself but he hasn’t though to do such a thing. He is too broken at this point, too upset to think of anything else but finding Magnus… Dead or alive. Her voice startles him and he whips around, his one good eye wide as he braces himself for new cruelty. He won’t run away, not anymore. The only good thing Carnage had done was unlocked that box he had chained so deep within him for so long. It was filled with all the injustices he had ever faced and gone through. Where he had been a whipped puppy for so long, the puppy now had teeth. Could now defend itself better than he could before. It’s a strange feeling though. As his fear flares so does something else inside of him. It rumbles and growls inside his core, something that want’s to be unleashed but doesn’t know how to break free. Not yet.

It takes him a moment to place her, to register what she said. A sharp inhale as his nostrils flare and his aching muscles slowly unwind. Before he can speak, she exhales fire and he quickly steps back with a look of surprise instead of alarm. For he remembers her. He remembers all of them. The children most of all. Instant guilt sweeps over him, an old and familiar blanket. ”You couldn’t do that before…” He states blankly, it wasn’t a question. He had heard their screams as much as they had heard his. He knows that they had all been weak. Surely if she could manipulate fire, she would have escaped much sooner. He would have remembered flames in the darkness.

His one good eye takes her in, notices her cleanliness and the soothing edges of her own brand. Ashamed, he drops his neck with his head towards the grass. ”I should have done more…” Pain in his voice, pain in his body, pain in his abused heart. He had been so wrapped up in his own suffering that he had forgotten them, had left them all behind. ”I should have saved you all.” As if there had been anything he could have done to release them from torture. But maybe if he had sacrificed himself, they could have been freed. It was what his father would have done but then again, he was nothing like Magnus. He remembers his father’s words clearly, how worthless he was. The shame burns him more than the brand on his flank does.  

Ledger