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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    [private]  i could be someone, ryatah
    #3

    these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

    The word alights on his tongue, but he does not speak it.
    Mother.

    She stands there like a vision, as if he has divined her, as if she has been forced into being purely by his wanting. 

    (Something shifts in the coward’s chest, something long-dormant, a kind of softness that has not existed in him since the darkness—is it fear?)

    He swallows at the sound of his name. Because she was the first who ever uttered it, as if to speak him into existence. He blinks once, slow, eyelashes fluttering. He wants to turn his face away in shame. It has been so many years now since she had curled herself around his sister and he had choked on the stench of death. It had been his failure then and it is his failure now. It has always belonged to him.

    But he does not look away until she comes closer. It is a reflex, perhaps, as if he worries she might see something in his face. Some dark truth. As if she might read the reality of him in the glacier-blue eyes. 

    (He has learned to breathe around the stench of death, though there is something different in the smell of this one. Because, not only had he not been able to prevent it, he hadn’t even tried. These are the worst, he has found. These are the deaths that wrap themselves so fiercely around his neck that he could not breathe even if he wanted to.) 

    I missed you,” he echoes. And he means it, of course he does, but there had been some small comfort in the separation. Because it had meant he did not have to confront his failure. He exhales a shuddering sigh, remembering. Remembering the rift, its jagged edges, how the blood had gone cold and all of the light had gone out of the world when he had learned of her death.

    There is a brief moment of quiet before he says, “I should have killed him myself, I’m sorry.” 

    And the coward chances a glance at his mother and thinks, there are so many things I should have done.

    —I just bite my tongue a bit harder



    @Ryatah


    Messages In This Thread
    i could be someone, ryatah - by Selaphiel - 03-20-2022, 02:59 PM
    RE: i could be someone, ryatah - by Ryatah - 03-20-2022, 04:45 PM
    RE: i could be someone, ryatah - by Selaphiel - 03-22-2022, 04:14 PM
    RE: i could be someone, ryatah - by Ryatah - 04-25-2022, 07:57 AM



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