Striking mights and maybes even more

A useless thing called life

It's a biting cold again

How little time they had left - if only they knew... Perhaps he would have said different things, then. Perhaps not.

"You wound me," she said, you wounded me, he thought. But his lips were sealed in silence, his eyes betraying nothing of what spun beneath. There was friction to this dance, at least in his world. They both strained to remain perfect, fragile statues of lies bending and flexing, so the mask would never slip off or show a hairline crack - they did not strain for ease, for companionship. For a brief moment, he wondered what it would feel like to give in: to break open.

But, no. That could not - would not - happen. Ever. And so he merely blinked, that small smile on his face, one corner of his mouth curling upwards. Would I mind? he asked himself, mulling on it as they walked in silence for a few seconds. Some part of him assumed she expected resistance - for him to put up a fight, before either yielding or revealing he'd given it to someone else, or was planning to. And one part of him loved to do the unexpected - when he could. She was a worthy leader of such an organization anyway, and she had stuck through with the herd even after being tossed out of her home. Maybe she had improved.

Was it worth a shot? Yes; if only to get the burden of the Plague off his shoulders. Its inactivity had been preying on his mind, and it was with a simple, airy laugh he delivered his response. "Oh, you should want that, shouldn't you? And just maybe I'll let you..." The sounded faded into silence; Irma gave his shoulder a squeeze, and for the briefest of moments something dark and cold flitted across his heart - as if saying, hurry up, quit fooling around. He sobered quickly, words forming in his throat. "It's yours. It's always been yours, Psyche." Serious and low of voice, it carried some weight he had no time to identify: his heart stopped in his chest and his movements ceased abruptly. On his shoulder, the owl began screeching and flapping her wings, but he stood rooted at the spot. Something cold, something other, was gripping him, crawling up his hind legs - it tasted of doom, flashes of fear splitting his heart and his mind and widening his eyes.

His head craned, turned, gaze going wide as he saw - nothing. He was disappearing into that thing, the thing which tugged at his insides and made it feel as if he was being turned inside out and dunked in icy water. Snapping his attention back at Psyche, the owl's screeching deafening in his ears, he began to shout her name - "PSYCH-" - but he got no further as the darkness swallowed him up, wrenching soul and body and mind from one era into another.