04-07-2015, 03:13 PM
She waits for him in the lonely twilight, beneath a sky with no stars, no sun, no moon. Bound to the in-between.
The whispers are everywhere- in every grain of sand, gathered and trapped like dandelion puffs in the needles of the cacti plants. Gone. The King is gone. So she waits for him because she must, because she is tethered through him to this life she clings to, because pain is something she understands. It is what pulses through her veins, it is the dust settled in the cracks of bones broken too many times- it is the fiber of her being, the essence of her existence.
She has never questioned pain.
Else is not left waiting long. She is hesitant at first when he pulls from the shadows like the apparitions from which he hides, forming from thought and darkness and simple expectation. And when he comes to her and pauses like a dropped, broken thing, a cold fist closes around her heart. She shudders, and the cold sand color of her skin ripples over the tremble of sinuous muscle. She feels for him, something besides fear, and it clamors through her veins, burrowing within her bones like a frightened beast.
“Caius?” She says his name like a question, mumbled past the sluggish lips of a scarred half-face. And when that single glacial eye lifts to settle in the familiar lines of his dark, aching face, she can feel the fist tighten and then release, punching a hole in her gut as it dropped to the dirt beneath her. “I don’t know how to help you, I don’t think I can make this better.”
She inches closer, willing away the raggedness of her breathing, the pounding of old fears against tired tatters of a used up heart. “Caius.” She tries again, this time drawing her nose across the slant of his tight jaw- flinching once when the old, smooth scars of her torn face brush against his. And when that single wide eye settles in his gaze, glacial blue with flecks of snow and panic, she wonders how different their ghosts really are. Hers live in her head, they fill her thoughts and bleed chaos into her dreams. She wonders if it’s reverse for him, if he’s safe inside his head.