i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
Does he miss it?
It is a simple enough question, certainly.
There is nothing cruel in it, nothing malicious. And yet. And yet, it drives a stake through his useless heart because perhaps he had not fully accepted that there was anything to miss. He had undoubtedly been foolish enough to convince himself that the lack of a pulse, the lack of a want for air, didn’t mean anything at all.
Maybe he has convinced himself that it’s only a dream.
He will wake up soon, lightyears away from here.
He will wake up grateful and warm and whole.
He will wake up in a world that makes sense.
But he is not dreaming. Every inch of him knows it. He swallows thickly, though there’s no reason for it. This is perhaps the one habit from his life that he is unwilling to give up. It is the one thing that allows him to believe that he is like the rest of them. He belongs here. Or he did once and that has to be enough to keep him.
Sad, she says. As if all of his grief is leaching out of his pores. He closes his eyes, the mouth pressed into a thin, thoughtful line. Though the warmth had been drained from his face and his heart before, it had still remained in his skin. And now? Now he is nothing more than a dead thing, shackled to earth on this side of the veil.
But the flowers spring up around him and he can feel them flicker to life along the ladder of his spine. And he smiles. Because it is a kindness he does not deserve, certainly. What he deserves, he knows, is to suffer. Someday, he thinks, he will collapse beneath the weight of his misery, and he’ll be dragged back to his feet and spurred back into action. Because a dead thing cannot die again.
He lowers his head, brushes his nose through the flowers, barely registers the way they tickle the soft skin of his mouth. Dead things cannot feel. There is a sharp twinge in the cavern of his chest as the realization settles over him, heavy.
“I thought I hadn’t been without it long enough to miss it,” he says, quiet. It has only been a matter of days. He has watched the sun rise and set four times since he fell through the rift and landed in the sea an undead thing, tracked its progression across the sky because undead things do not need sleep. “But I think I do,” he finally adds. The words hitch and catch in his throat and he swallows again. “I do.”
