en natt så kall och månen den var klar

Was that their main difference—that Psyche was fluid, ever-moving, while he had frozen in time? Had she adapted to the ups and downs of their road, moved with the shaking of the earth and the shattering of the skies? When there came a dip in the road, had she simply gone with it, knowing she would rise again? While he had raised his head and tried to pound the road into submission, striving for the heavens and pretending that his back didn't lower with the inevitable?

He kept on fighting. He kept on fighting change, he kept on fighting the future, himself, those he loved—but most of all, he kept on fighting time. Seconds flowed by, minutes, hours, days, lifetimes, and Mauja remained rooted at the spot in the timestream, frozen, shackled by his infected pride and soul-rotting bitterness.

If she moved to the rhythm of the world, she was strength. And he, he was weakness, because he did not join in. Because he lived in his dream still, and reality poisoned him, because reality did not match dream anymore. It had, but he'd lost it, and in losing it he'd.. given up, in protest. As if his denial of the world could make it go back to the way it had been.

It was pathetic. Childish. The kind of truth that didn't make itself known until years after the fact; it made him want to slick his ears to his neck. He loathed it, and all the other things he knew about himself, but even though all he wanted to do was reach down and somehow stab himself to death, he never managed to change. Two years or more, and he was still the same, still stuck in the same place, in the glory of his rising reign just before the long, hard fall. Was it the sound of his pride snapping, or the sound of his future breaking?

Because he had no future. He hadn't had one since then. And still didn't. Because if you gave up on life, life would become meaningless—simply the passage of time.

And that was what his life had become. Meaningless seconds filled with nothing but an abstract longing for things to end.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not," she said.

He'd always known she'd been the stronger of the two of them.

He only met her gaze for a moment, burned by their intense ferocity, shamed by her strength. She was everything he wished he was, and in his envy he'd shunned her for a very, very long time. "I shouldn't be, either," he replied in a voice where he, for once, masked nothing; it bore all of his frustration and shame, but most of all, it was rank with bitterness. He was poisoned by himself, and he knew it, but he'd never been strong enough to scrub its black stain away. He hated it, and he hated himself, and that sounded amongst his words too. "But I am, because.. because.." His mind groped for words and his ears slicked themselves against his neck; he wasn't sure whether he didn't know how to phrase it, or if the truth scalded his tongue. When he managed to go on a second later, his voice was an angry hiss and his eyes narrowed. "Because I'm a lame fucking idiot incapable of moving on; I'm stuck in the past, it's like I'm just waiting to wake up again and this will all have been a nightmare, and each time I think I manage to let go it's for no longer than a minute and then I'm sinking again in this black swamp and I hate it and—"

He drew a deep breath.

"—I hate myself."

He would've gotten up, then, stalked off into the darkness—would've, if not for the precious hatchling lying too close, his heartbeat thrumming through the bond. That small, fragile creature was in the way of Mauja heaving himself up and disappearing.

Briefly, he hated that, too. It meant that he had to stay and confront this. Stay and fight for once, instead of run away.

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