i am the vanguard of your destruction

Steady. Steady now. It was like losing a thought—one moment you had it, at the tip of your tongue or the forefront of your mind, and in the next.. gone, like yesteryear's snow. He hurt, and he hurt damnably, but he wasn't really sure why anymore. Because life was fragile? Because he was an ass? Because Ophelia was leaning on another man? Because Gaucho stared daggers at him? Because his daughter hurt?

He didn't know anymore. The words that could've straightened out the situation and smoothed the confused wrinkles from his emotions had lost all their meaning, sucked empty by the vortex roaring in his mind, and whatever he had been accused of—whatever they all meant when they yelled you! at him as if it somehow explained anything—was lost along with them. And it was only through an effort of will that he was able to cling to his tentative query, black-rimmed ears straining desperately in the darkness to catch an answer.

For someone to shine a ray of light. For someone to tear this burden from his soul, and not let it rest upon him to voice the gaps in the evidence. He couldn't do it, not when there was not much of his mind left whole. Everything lay in shambles around him, the life he had once had a mess crushed underneath the stampeding hooves of fate and himself. All doors kept open, until one by one they slammed shut in his face. He let the moments walk past him and then he lost them forever. And then it hurt. And it was all his fault. And as if he wasn't aware of that already, half the goddamn world saw fit to make it incredibly clear to him what an idiot he was.

Rubbing glass shards into his wounds.

He swallowed. No one said anything he needed to hear—and oddly enough, it was Torleik who saved him. He breathed out, a long, heaving sigh the likes of crumbling mountains, and he even forgot to be angry at the fact that the black stallion knew his name, while Mauja had no bloody idea who he was.

Someone else had caught on. Someone else had taken up the shield Mauja had begun to edge in in front of Gaucho, and thankfully he let it slip through numb fingers, somehow confident the now-much-calmer black wouldn't let it fall to the ground. Though.. somewhere, in the back of his mind, he couldn't quite understand why he wasn't angry anymore. He knew he had been seeing red (or, in Mauja's case, blue), he knew he'd wanted to rip him apart on the spot, and of course he wanted to be the one with whom Ophelia had sought refuge—but, the anger was gone. He couldn't hold on to it.

Besides, the man was being sensible now.

Mauja swallowed. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to do this. He wasn't strong enough to be here. The only reason he was still standing, still looking so calm and composed and fucking perfect in his armor, was because he'd pulled down the blinds and locked himself out of his own mind. The world was a distant thing hidden behind a mushy kind of wall, a veil between him and the world; he was floating down a sunlit stream, detached and numb, humming under his breath as he rolled over in the water and watched the blue sky slip past. And the others gathered were no more than rocks in the river, insignificant and distant.

They had been talking for a while, now, saying things Mauja had no idea about, because he hadn't been listening. And even if he had been, he wouldn't have processed the words, just heard them but not what they meant. Noises, noises in the back of his mind, and with an almost creepily vacant look in his glassy blue eyes he tilted his head and stared silently at Gaucho.

[ super-emotional mauja is kind of exhausting so here, have a dumbdumb mauja instead ]