It is hard to remember the pain that once driven him so sharply.
The pain that manifested in him and throughout him. Defined him throughout all of his young years. It feels like reaching for a dream to try and touch it now—feels like trying to carve out the truth of a statue from a bolder. His touch is clumsy and the vision of it slips away before he can grasp it, turning to dust in his mouth. Not that he minds. It is a strange thing to be so severed from what used to be the all of him, but he would rather rest in this new peace than resist the nightmares of old. He would rather die in it.
So he shakes the discomfort, that vague feeling of forgetting something, and he thrusts himself into this new rhythm of life. The rhythm of life where he is not just the biological father of offspring, but an involved dad. Where he watches the twins grow alongside Mazikeen. Where he does his best to fortify the borders of her kingdom and provide protection to the residents of her home (theirs, he reminds himself).
If he second-guesses himself, if he doubts himself, he ignores the feelings. If he is unsure of what to do next and how, he casts it aside. Instead, he wakes this summer morning with a faint smile, groaning as he rolls over and buries his golden face in her velvet neck. “Do we have to get up,” he grins, eyes shut tight and his voice gritty with the sound of exhaustion. “Or can we just stay here all day instead.”
The sun glints unrelenting at them through the trees and without thinking, he throws up an arched shadow over them, muting the sun and darkening the space where they lay against one another.
“I could just make it night again. It wouldn’t even be that hard.”
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
@Mazikeen