He exists in their shadows.
He fades in and out like shadows, like the tide, like oblivion – every pixel he is made of visible, flickering, then gone. It isn’t unusual for him to spend his time this way, caught in a shutter speed that doesn’t line up, wafting in and out of existence like memories in a dream. He isn’t right today – there are no half-smiles, no mischievous laughs to rattle in his throat. He tore a hole in the fabric of time, and it took him someplace ugly.
‘You are not living.’
She spat venom, and he felt it sizzle and burn on his flesh. It isn’t meant for him. He isn’t meant to exist in the spaces between their breaths. He isn’t meant to see the things that he sees, to witness these private moments that he was never invited into. They wonder what has become of him, and don’t realize that he’s never left. He is the air that they breathe. He is the cold wind. He is the cloud of vapor rolled off their tongues and out into the atmosphere.
‘You are not alive.’
She has always been the softer of them both, and he doesn’t expect the words in that order as something she is capable of. He hasn’t seen her promise yet. He doesn’t know the things that Spyndle is made of completely, but he is beginning to.
‘You were forgotten in the in-between, and I should have left you there.’
And he knows the reality behind that threat. It shakes him to his core.
elektrum
i am and always will be the optimist