Help me out before I drown
Save me now before I give up
Shameful. Shameful that he flinches as if being struck across the face when her voice breaks through the shadow haze to reach him. The stranger had caught him for the briefest moment he had been unguarded, focused with a brow furrowed at the utter blackness above him. It was dangerous to do so, in these times, in this place, already at a disadvantage with the empty socket where his right eye should have been, the claw marks long healed into pink puckered scars. Even with the bear always at his beck and whim to call and protect, all it would take is a second to change his life dramatically forever. A lesson he had learned one too many times.
The wariness settles back on his features as she comes closer, his nostrils flaring as he catches her scent. A whiff of something that makes him think of lilacs, it seems to soothe something deep within him. A mixture of oak moss and beeswax like when one blows hot glass. Glass. She’s closer to him now and in the faint light he can make out her translucent skin. Sees through her. It doesn’t register that there are no tattered wings, the lighter shade of coloring which makes this girl of glass more translucent than the one he knew before. It’s not her but his mind immediately jumps to conclusions. His ears ring with her screams as she is pushed carelessly off the cliff. His chest constricts at the sound of her shattering to literal pieces on the hard rocks below. The crack in his already fragile replacement of a heart threatens to spread as he gasps, ”Adaline….” His rough voice cracking with misuse and dismay.
She’s looking up where his gaze once wandered and now… now he can see the differences. How a galaxy seems to twirl and dance across her chest. The lighter tone of her glassy skin. The purple hues to her iris’s. And now she’s looking at him and he can’t help but see pieces of her staring back at him. (I never should have let you go. I never should have left you. I never deserved your friendship. I should have… I should have… I should have… I should have been better. I should have protected you. Stayed with you. I should have loved you better.) It’s still vivid in his memory, of Adaline trying to comfort him when Carnage spit him out the first time. Unstable and scared of his own power. But she, fragile as she had been, wasn’t afraid of him and looked at him without fear. Once he had viewed her with pity and ignorant disgust for something he had not understood. He wish he had told her, how brave he found her. How she was stronger and more fearless than anyone he had ever met. Of course, in the alternate world that Carnage provided the second time he captured him, he told Adaline every day. All of it. And loved her completely the way she deserved as she loved him back in ways he never deserved. The lines between reality and madness start to blur again and he shakes his head violently, trying to reel himself back in and anchor himself to what was real. For once he’s glad for the oppressing darkness that surrounds them, it makes it harder to see the ghosts that he’s sure now linger just behind her shoulder.
“My name is Hourglass.” She must find him a fool or worse, with the way he’s been staring at her, mumbling names of those long gone or perhaps never existed in the first place. ”I’m Ledger.” He finally breathes, a tight smile on his lips and hesitance flickering in the gold flecks of his dark eye. He reaches for fragments of conversation, knowing he had placed himself in this situation by coming here but still struggling to remember what it was like to just be… normal. Anxiety flutters around the crystal organ that lays subdued and heavy beneath the X branded on his breast. Tucking his muzzle towards it, shifting slightly to dispel the weight of restlessness encircling him. ”How long…” He pauses, tries again. ”How long has it been like this Hourglass?” Trying to use her name to remind himself that it’s not her. Can’t be her. Will never be her.
Ledger
I just want to treat you better
@[Hourglass]