03-22-2022, 04:30 PM
these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—
Will the death he failed to prevent always set his heart to screaming? Will the eyes always burn?
Will he someday be free of this physical reminder of his failure?)
She moves toward him with an enthusiasm he does not deserve, but he is grateful for the smile she wears. Because it means that she is still Maze and he is still Sela and they are still friends. And he tries for a smile with her teasing, though it is distant and stilted while he nods. It is the best place for him, he thinks but doesn’t say. Because he had tried to make himself useful in the light of day and had failed. Failed her, failed his mother.
(What she must think while she appraises him. While he goes on breathing in the reek of each of her deaths. It is such a hopeless endeavor, he thinks.)
He looks at her a long moment, searching her face. Certainly it is a sincere admission, but he cannot allow himself to believe it. So he summons up that same smile, or the apparition of one, and glances past her to the flash of movement. Children, undeniably hers. Undeniably his brother’s, too. (So what does that make him? Their uncle? He thinks of Bolder, how the young shapeshifter had called him uncle. Something twists darkly in his chest.)
“Congratulations,” he murmurs, nodding in the direction of the girls. It is genuine, if not particularly warm. If nothing else, this serves as a reminder of all of the ways he’d wanted to be useful to her and had not been.
He had not been able to tell her exactly when the time would be right to kill the thing she loved until it was too late. And he had railed against the darkness in her, tried his best to draw the light back out of her. But it had not been enough.
He draws in a shaky breath and swallows. “You’re happy, then,” he half-whispers and finally smiles something sincere.
—I just bite my tongue a bit harder
@Mazikeen