He…

is a friend.

And I can’t touch him.

It all falls away from me—the wild anger tearing at my insides, the fury of this stranger (who’s not a stranger, he isn’t, apparently he’s a friend--) butting into business he had no right to butt into he was invited to stick his nose in. This man I’ve never seen before; this man who had looked at me in such a funny way all the way back at the Arch, and that had been a clue, hadn’t it, that had been a little snippet of both past and future I’d been too dumb to notice at the time—

--and it didn’t matter how I felt about his words, or how I felt about his face, or if I wanted to claw out those eyes that wouldn’t stop looking at me like that—

--because he was a friend.

And it all fell away, all the anger and the nonsense—and before I had had wings sitting on my back but now they were fizzled into oblivion and obliviousness once again, and whatever lightning storm I had been cooking up around me suddenly fell away against the dark clouds of—

--of a friend.

I stood there, empty, everything empty. Because it had been the passion of fury that had been driving my mindless limbs—and without that, I was just mindless. I was dazed as my eyes fell back on my Ma, dizzy and punch-drunk with what she had said. So gentle compared to the roughness of Shapes’ voice; so sad, so forlorn and aching for a support and I guess that’s what he was to her.

He protects me and that… that is…good.

He protects her.

From me.

I just stared. I don’t even know if there was something stirring in my eyes at all—maybe they were like blank stones set in the face of a statue while my mind nibbled and tested and tossed around the words she had said, the meaning behind them, the feeling the clue the hint I had to--

”Your mother isn't sure what to do with you? That's your fault. You're awful—“

Unfettered honesty.

"Are you happy to hear now that even though your mother was raped by a god, she still wants you?”

A strength.

My mother’s rape.

”This is my daughter, my blood and my story.”

My mother’s rape.

If given the choice now, I would have had you again.

My mouth was ash; the mountains were ash. The sentinels I had fallen in love with, the skies and the glint of a lake down below—all of it was ash, ash on my tongue, ash in my eyes making them burn even though not a single tear dropped from them. The air inside me was ash, too; I had trouble speaking, trouble breathing, and a distant alarm in the back of my head told me that I had to leave. I had to leave. There was nothing to gain by staying here—except more pain, causing my Ma more pain by looking at me.

But words found themselves and tumbled from my ruined jaw, spilling in ashen monotone.

“’If given the choice now, I would have had you again’,” I spoke quietly—words I had remembered by heart, because I had drawn so much strength from them, so much reassurance that my Ma loved me, loved me, loved me--

I closed my eyes. “What a crock of shit.”

I turned to the entrance; my steps were dead, heavy weights as I left a valley of ashes.



[EEP THE END SORRY ABOUT THAT



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