No, she says, only bothering to turn around to really look at me when she speaks, that she decided to walk.

It hurts, I don’t know why, but I do know that I don’t want it to, so I pretend that it doesn’t. My neck still stiffens, though, and my jaw clenches, the gold of my eyes hardening, and for a while, I just look at her, wondering:

Why does it bother me so much that she doesn’t seem to care that its been months?

Why didn’t she care, if that was true?

Was it… me?

Is it because I… Do I…

No, Duir answers for me, you don’t love her.

I hide the softness that aches in my heart with metaphorical steel blades and armor. Like a knife, I rise up from my thoughts to retort to her, when she asks where I’ve been, with every ounce of frustration I’ve bottled up since I’d come back here, actually needing her, and she’d been gone, leaving me alone, becoming fuel for the dark rage which had flooded me in my loss. Maybe it wasn’t fair, to place all these burdens on her; maybe I should have sought out Erebos, and placed my weary heart with him, but, dammit…

I wanted just one woman I could rely on. Were they all fake, like she is, like my mother, like Xynia - all of them? Snakes, soft and supple, inch by inch, coiling about your legs and heart, until they slithered away, or struck out with poisoned fangs? Fuck that. If she can lash out with her hollowed fangs, so can I, even if her venom is the only one which burns as it courses through veins, she being the only one of us so naturally cold blooded; a girl like Mordecai might just be immune to poisons all together.

"My dad died," and Deimos, almost the same day, I answer her, coldly, because if I don’t, I’ll start saying things that only little boys can muster without feeling like little bitches. Even now, there is mockery on her face, like she sees me floundering and she condemns me for it. She doesn’t ever just apologize. She always passes the blame back to me, bound neatly with a ribbon. I want to blow the package into bits, and throw the smithereens in her face, but don’t – I know better than to yell at her. Girls like Mordecai definitely get physical, fast, on all levels. "And I had to deal with the resurrected Rift assholes situation, of course. Oh, yeah, and I became Lord of the Basin. Fucking you was less important I guess."


I drop my head, wondering when I learned to talk about those activities with something less than reverence, or coy allusion; had it been when one of my last, meager roots binding me to this world had withered, culled by a fell swipe of one of his contraptions? Or had it been when I’d come back, to find my pretty raven gone, and myself, again made the fool for having believed anyone would be there to comfort me in the first place?

Nothing was sacred in this world. Not trust, not love, not hope, not a damn concept that I’d been promised as a child that would make this life worthy of the suffering it held had been allowed to belong to me, for anything more than just long enough for it to hurt when it was taken away.

Nothing.