that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
The smell that reaches his decaying nose is so different from what he expects, that it nearly pulls him up short—nearly catches him off-guard and takes him down a different path. It is something alive and yet not in the way that he expects. Alive but without the flesh and blood that he would anticipate. It is, instead, something caught in between (where he in his right state of mind, perhaps he would think that he is like that, caught in between life and death) but half-crazed as he is, it only serves to confuse him even more.
He pauses, his rotting teeth gnashing together and cracking under the pressure.
He continues forward in a blind momentum kind of movement, lurching forward on feet that barely can stand to hold the weight of him, and he is stopped short by her confession. His breath comes in rasping noises, scratching up his throat and over his swollen tongue, and his golden eyes sweep over the land in front of him. “Blind?” he croaks, trying to figure out the meaning of it—searching his mind for the hook.
“Blind?”
He asks again and he laughs, a gurgling kind of noise that hurts as it bubbles up his throat. “Why come alone?” he manages to string the words together as he pauses, trapped between the boy that he could be and the monster that he is—this cursed being that hungers and thirsts for unnatural ways to stave it. “Why—“ he starts again before her fear slams into him like a physical force, knocking the air out of him.
It twists and contorts in his body until he is afraid of her, afraid for her, afraid for himself. Until he can barely breathe around it. He croaks out a death-rattle breath. “I—“ he starts before coughing, dried blood flecking his lips, breath rattling in his half-dead body, “Why—“ he stars again but then pauses.
He looks unseeing around him, not seeing the skeleton amongst the trees.
“What’s happening?” he manages, quivering beneath the weight of her fear and his shame.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
