let my shadows prove the sunshine
He copes the only way he knows how: through touch, pretending as though all the things that had happened to him were merely just a dream, a terror-fueled nightmare that somehow crossed into the plains of reality. It left behind that terrible scar on his shoulder that traces up to his neck and though he imagines that it is all over, part of him (somewhere deep inside) knows that it is only beginning. That churning in his abdomen is more than he could ever imagine; parasites living and breathing deep within his flesh, brought forth from another world by dark magic itself.
Svedka knows that his unease is palpable - the tension that settles across his spine is unlike him in so many ways, he is not surprised in the way that Ilma glances at him with a deep concern that turns her lovely eyes dark. He loves the way she doesn’t pry and instead, places the familiar warmth of her pale mouth against his jawline. The gesture causes him to sigh most contentedly, leaning into her as if she somehow could hold him and all his turmoil, trembling slightly. He doesn’t know how to tell her where he’d been or what he’d been through (just as he couldn’t bear to tell Solace all the excruciatingly painful details), afraid of reliving that nightmare once again. It is much easier, he decides with a flutter of his white lashes in a slow blink, to put it to the side to rot until it was nothing but a distant memory, long forgotten.
Ilma’s soft voice breaks the quiet and for a moment, he feels as though he hadn’t heard her or that he had even imagined her speaking at all. His eyes flicker open confusedly, turning to her with a sharp twist of his head that pulls taut the gnarled skin of his scarred shoulder and neck. “What did you say?” His voice is thin and cold, not because she had asked it, but the idea of it being so preposterous (so ghastly, in fact, that there is a deep-seated dread that coils in his stomach at the very real possibility of it being true). Svedka doesn’t even wait for her to clarify because his head then begins to swim. “I’m not -” he begins, his voice heightening with big inhales of air, “that’s impossible - I can’t, he can’t have -”
His voice stops as if he is pausing but he doesn’t begin again, because the idea of him makes his throat tighten and his chest feels so weighted, Svedka can’t catch his breath. He tries to calm himself for the sake of Ilma and his daughters that frolic before him but he cannot ignore the sound of his blood throbbing in his ears. His gasps are shallow as he breathily asks her with fear in his eyes: “Why did this happen?”
It’s a loaded question, one that Ilma would have no answer for.
svedka
@[Ilma]