we are the heroes of our time
but we're dancing with the demons in our minds

—and I don't even know how to start this, how to.. how to eventually get up again. Get off this cold, sodden ground, and out of the shadows the stars cast—these prison bars of leafless branches and the deathly pale glow of marble—how to get up again, when there's more than just memory tying my heart to the ground. When.. when all I want to do is to just.. wake up in the warm wash of early morning sunlight, and.. just all of this shit—

Because it's where his mind fled to—some old memory, one he couldn't place, but it was.. it was perfect. The memory of that feeling of having had a good, long sleep, and just slowly being teased back into consciousness, waking up lying down in grass—dew-laden, glistening grass—with pleasantly cool sunlight lighting up the thin rim between his eyelids, and.. and just that feeling of oh so slowly slipping back into the waking world, a light feeling of weightlessness, of.. of peace.. with no anxiety chasing his heart to up its pace, no start of black, throttling despair to cast him into wakefulness.

Just.. peace.

But this wasn't that—this was lying on a cold autumn night's ground, all shadows and distant, stark starlight, with.. with a pony sort of toppled on top of him. She had moved, though, somehow wriggled off his chest to just lie nestled against him as his voice cut through the air and I have damned myself—

It had been true then. It was true still. Maybe he hadn't been born damned but he had well and truly fixed that over the course of his life, jagged lines drawn like criss-cross scars over the covers of his history book.

Out where the dreams all hide,
Out where the wind don't blow,
Out here the good girls die.
And the sky won't snow
Out here the bird don't sing
Out here the field don't grow
Out here the bell don't ring...

He wasn't sure if she was still listening, or if she'd fallen asleep—she was so quiet, just breathing sort of awkwardly in the vicinity of his neck, her dead weight propped up against his chest in a way that was both comforting and a bit.. alarming, almost, like what if the reason she fell off was because she died but there was that slow, subtle ticking of the bomb in her chest and the rhythmic way her ribs swelled with breath so she wasn't dead but she was so quiet until he started speaking those quiet, bitter words that fell like poison from his lips (but it was too late to spit it out now)—

And somehow she was sitting up, planted on her arse next to him and sort of towering over him, and it would've been terrifying (because of the things coming out of my mouth), some kind of otherworldly judge peering down on him (and he had this moment's mad urge to just bite her long forelock tendrils and yank them to pull her back down to the ground) and listening as he spoke The Only Truth That Mattered, the truth that explained everything and made him forget everything else—all the things that he had decided, all the good things in life, and how natural it felt to be wrapped up in Kahlua's embrace—

All these little things, swallowed by the cold infinity of stars and drowned in the shadow of long-dried tarry blood, and his ears were slick against his neck as he forced it out between blood-stained teeth and her repeated attempts to make him stop by saying that name—

There were more traces of diluted blood drawn over his neck, just faint ones, silver in the monochromatic night-light—but they were there, little things that would remind him of this if he could just see them, but he couldn't, and something in the back of his mind fell to the ground when he was done, defying the fact that he was already on it.

Because he had finally said.

He had finally spat it out, into the ruined perfection of a late autumn night.

Into the fucking void between his cold precision and her raw-hot passion.

His head laid flat against the ground, and his heart too, and he waited—he waited for her to rise, and to disappear, like smoke or snow blown about, because.. because now she knew the truth.

(It was truth, right?)

It felt like truth. It smelled like truth. It tasted like truth, when he said it—and it looked like truth, reflected in his pale, wide eyes.

But she still just sat there, her breath washing against his neck, anchoring him in his fear with her touch because any moment—any moment that spot of warmth would turn infinitely cold as she would let the night swim back in to claim him (and I want to let it).

Haven't we been over this? a voice whispered in the back of his mind—in the back of his soul—every word spoken with a kind of razor delicacy and dripping snow and blood. It was Irma's soul-voice, always slow, always careful, sentences crafted with such precision and care, the edges and burrs in it smoothed over with even more cold things—

You not alone, came Diego's darker echo, something in the depths of his tone accusing—

"I'm sorry," he whispered, in the midst of something—Elding's looming shape a blur in the veil of his hot tears, her voice a broken mess in his ears because he couldn't understand what she was saying—it was far-off and distant, trying to make its way through his ears to his brain but the brain wasn't listening because maybe they had been trying to help but it was just another thing poking guilt at him and—

—“…that all came from you, didn’t it?”—

—“You can’t be empty either, cuz I’m feeling something right now.”—

—“Your heart’s still beating.”

And it was, a painful ticking in his chest, a violent shudder through his veins with each beat it took—her words hot and knife-like, shearing through the sludge and the darkness and—and baring a truth that was more painful than the other truth.

You still have a heart.

You always had a heart.

Because it was there, in the fucking glacier, first entombed by armor and shields and duty, loyalty, and then left out in the snow to be covered by blizzards and ice and blood frozen in delicate patterns all around it—

—and then just sort of forgotten there as bit by bit his fragile mind took over and eradicated the connections to it.. one by one.. until the only thing existing outside the sanctum on his thoughts was this confused, raging blizzard.

"I have a heart," he croaked through the haze, not quite sure whether it was a statement or a question—the most pathetic, sorry question he had ever asked in his whole, damned life. And it just slipped out of him, like a little piece of hope, like it was suddenly the most important thing he had ever asked—because he decided it had been a question—and the look in his tear-veiled eyes as he stared up at her was.. it was desperate. It was helpless. It was begging.

[ @[Roskuld] -- auditions are over, time to post again <3 it could've been longer/better end, but I got a phone call just before the last paragraph it messed me up a little :x ]

lord, the demands you're making-
help the monster on two feet
walk him down the hall, repeat
and when he's strong enough to stand alone
you'll notice what big teeth . . .