i am the vanguard of your destruction

Something felt odd. Weird. Wrong. (False.) Detached.

He felt like he was watching a moment between strangers, an interloper on the scene of a reunion between (—what?)—a puppet mimicking the normalcy of life.

Pretending to be fucking normal when the truth, the truth he held so close to his heart, was that he hadn't had the sense to miss her.

(Until now, until she was here, and he realized how long he'd stumbled through the darkness, and then the breath rolling down his neck smelled familiarly of guilt—)

Mauja missed people in the abstract. He remembered them at odd times, thinking fondly of moments shared and futures lost, and his heart hurt a little, and perhaps he wept in the lonesome darkness, but then it fell back beneath the surface and he forgot again. And it went on.. and on.. and on. He missed Psyche, but how often did he think about her? He missed d'Artagnan, but now that he was out of the throes of his grief and hurt, how many thoughts did he spent on that cherry red bay? And let's not talk about Kahlua—

The words were spoken, too loud to take back, too dangerous to contradict, but they left ashes in his mouth and he couldn't spit them out.

'I missed you too' was what any normal person would've said, but she deserved more than that—she deserved truth, and the truth was simple: I care about you a fuck-ton but I didn't actually miss you yet.

But how do you say that to someone holding you with such genuine affection and warmth that you're close to melting (heat-cracks, pressure-cracks, ice blowing apart—) in their embrace? Her (when had it become so difficult to think of her as female?) short, stout body pressed close to his, shoulder to shoulder, awkward in their different proportions, neck warm against his withers, heart heavy beneath his head; he had a responsibility here, to protect, to shield, from harm. Even if that meant being silent about his slip of the tongue; the truth was rather arbitrary when the words had simply tried to convey some sort of 'I care about you, too'-esque feeling. It was just.. semantics.

(A feeling like lying.)

"Mmh," he breathed in response, guilty eyes closing. Gods, she was so warm, so.. safe in some way; she fucking held him and it was nearly enough to make his knees buckle and crash him to the distant forest floor. This was—

It wasn't the tip of a horn rupturing his heart, but it was damn near the same.

Maybe he shouldn't have asked Tembovu to kill him.
Maybe he should've asked him to hug him.

Too fucking late—

He was sure his head became thrice as heavy across her broad back, the muddled confusion and her question a weight he did not want to bear—thoughts he did not want to think. He had no clarity. He was lost in some.. fucking gray fog, somewhere, running around like a blind mule and he guessed the only thing he might do was trip and fall off the edge of the world, or something.

"Well," he began to say, but came up short. How were they treating him here? There was a certain memory, a certain thread of envy, of bitter resentment, curling through his existence; the memory of that Aji on the meeting, of ranks handed out, of .. Mauja's eyes clenched shut harder. "Well enough," he finally said. It wasn't their fault; they had no obligations to fix him. They.. they.. he was just some old, dusty relic of the past, a mistake someone had made.

Yeah. Just a mistake. Just a—

He didn't notice until it was too late, and by then he was already halfway to the ground.

[ @Roskuld - he's just kinda collapsing at the end xD ]