Amara is gone. It’s never been a thing that has heavily worried her to the point of franticness, but Hobgoblin continues to scold and abuse her over the  panic that has been steadily  settling in her nerves and brain. Healers are supposed to be good at hiding their feelings, the winces that shouldn’t ever be made in the direction of their patients, the laughter she sometimes thinks about spilling at the overreactions made about pitiful, simple wounds, and definitely not panic over things that others would find immature and a waste of time.  
But Amara makes her scared in a plethora of ways: fear of attack, fear of death, fear of that smell and those words, fear of trust, fear of…. abando-
“Monster not worth You. Monster not good. Let Monster die.”
I can’t. She’s my responsibility. I couldn’t live with myself if something was to happen to her.
“MONSTER TRY KILL.”
She has never been brave enough(or attempted to summon up enough bravery at once) to tell Hobgoblin just how true his aggressive, spit-spewing words of rage and protection are. She doesn’t want to think of that face, the one with grey skin and golden eyes like the moon during Orangemoon, the black blood in her cuts and gorges in her body where skin and muscle should be making themselves at home but weren't, the bones staring her down with their pale glares, an insult to her and life and death as Amara choose to play God before her very eyes. Every word from that day haunts the halls of her memories like a ghost that she unintentionally summoned, telling her how everything is her fault.
And maybe it is. She can’t stop the thought from entering her head as she yells that same word over and over again. “Amara!” Please.
 “D I E.”
I’m sorry. Please come back
She wishes she didn’t have him, that he wasn’t burrowing eyes so similar but so different to Amara’s in her burning, wounding skin and listening to every thought in her head, feeling emotions that he doesn’t want to feel as she so desperately tries to soothe herself.
“Monster not worth You. You better. Let Monster die like Monster want.”
How can we be sure she wants to die?
“Care for no one. Hurt You.”
You don’t care for anyone either. Do you think you should die too?
Something comes from him. If one is never truly to feel a bond there is no way to explain, but somehow she knows the difference between his emotions and her own, whether he chooses to reflect her’s back to her so that it shows her what she is doing or if he is feeling something genuine. This is genuine, and it strikes her heart like a sledgehammer, breaking the pieces of glass its constructed of and sinking them in her ribs, scattering them.
Pain. Hurt. Those are the only ones coming from him that she is sure isn’t her's reflected back over.
“Hobgoblin care for You.”
I’m sorry.
“Know.”
He draws the tears from her eyes like the rain, and he lets them fall from her blue clouds without ever thinking of a way to stop them. She has never thought of hurting him, never even thought that he could feel pain like that, that he cared for her.
If she had hands, she would have clenched them and pulled her fingers into tight, small fists, and would have let her feelings clot there. But she doesn’t, and her next best bet is to simply let him know, because there is little that can be hidden between a paired of bonded, entwined souls.
You make me feel important in the smallest ways.
The waves are hitting their feet now, and there is some little part of her that tells her that Amara would never be found out here. She They could scour the sea together, spend days and even weeks looking, and never find a sign of Amara in the depths.
With both of their hearts heavy, filled to the brim with emotion and one another’s sadness, they are confined to the brink of their home, debating an embrace. Neither take the first of many short steps that would become strides into the sea, and as if Sikeax had finally grown old of her favourite thing, she is the first to turn away from the expanse.
Foam builds at her knees and he gives way to an easier seafaring form, slipping through the waves in the deeper shallows, now far from her side. He is the first to notice the child’s legs, how they don’t move and stand like the pillars of a great statue, something the sea might someday wish to swallow whole.
Maybe in search of a way to cheer his sorry state, he stalks them, never once thinking that they would never see him in their entire life.
He inhales til his lungs cannot possibly carry any more air, and when he feels that the child is close to have his pleasure sited upon them, abruptly rises out of the waves and blasts salt water against their skin. Teeth ignite the darkness where his black lips had once been, and as he takes his time with flinging and showing off the impressive set that he has been blessed with, he notices something different.
The mental image slaps her like the back of a hand. It breaks the barrier that she’s built up around her emotions through the years and without thought or hesitation, reaches down and rips forth a cringe worthy of worrying about.
“Baby no eyes.”
He isn’t far from her. Correction: they aren’t far from her. Her front legs are already bursting through the waves with all the power they can muster, stupidly reimagining that sight over and over again so she knows what to expect. Both of them are still there for her to find when she reaches them, Hobgoblin’s features painted with pain and discomfort from the sight he has been forced withstand. The wings will never be beautiful, like this child, this poor, hopeless, disgusting child that she can say only a mother could love.
How dreadfully wrong she is.
“Kill baby. Baby nasty.”
No.
The closer inspection is worse than she wants it to be, and at this point in her time as the Dragon’s Throat’s only long term Sun Physician, she should have known better than to expect things to be pretty. People come to a healer when they are sick and dying, and sometimes, they’re just found that way, as if the world has given them to her for her to save them.
She is not an angel. She is not a priest. She is nothing more than a being trying desperately to get through the motions of living with her own problems while working without thought of herself to make sure others are happy when she cannot find a way to be. She is only a single soul, trying, in a world of sufferers.
“Hello? It would be embarrassingly stupid to expect the child to see her approaching, and she can’t be sure of how well their hearing is against the rolling sounds of the waves and Hobgoblin’s pitiful attempts at singing softly.
Oh, how she loves to hear him sing.
“Turn in the direction of my voice. I can help you.” Please let me. “Who took care of your wounds?
They’re terribly dressed, as if the worker had no idea of what they were doing, or were too weak in the stomach to access the situation. She doesn’t blame them. Blood is leaking from the hastily done dressings, from the places where her eyes should be. Someone is going to have to take them out and off for her to properly care for the wounds, and Hobgoblin is not gentle enough in his touches to do the work, nor can she imagine him wanting to do it.
But isn’t it what she signed up for when she took this job? It’s never something she has cared to think about, but it has presented itself before her, a gift from the Gods, as if they expect her to prove just how much she can take before she breaks.
Despite the absolute horror of this mess, she tries to find her solace in imagining what colour the child’s eyes might have been originally. Vibrant greens, soft blues, deep purples, browns poured from honey and amber that ignited beautifully in the perfect light that could take a breath away and keep it, but never once does she imagine the child having yellow eyes, much like the moon during Orangemoon.

OOC: Hobgoblin's first form is a black Serval and then changes to a Leopard Seal when mentioned.

"If you could hear me then, can you hear me now?"

Sikeax;

i'm missing the beauty in your soul

She hurts, filling herself with pain in that way that rips the very soul from the casket of the body. It consumes and destroys her. It draws a knot in her throat and clots her veins and keeps her muscles tense and joints locked, heart clenching shut with each painful, destroying beat that thrusts its mass inside of her chest cavity. She can almost feel the world fading out of her when the child steps away from her. No one has ever truly fled from her in specifics, except maybe for the exception of Hobgoblin’s presence beside her.
He too is lashed upon by her feelings, withering and breaking down as the intensity of her emotions becomes a tsunami against him. He is frail and weak beneath all that she spills into world, with tears brimming at the edges of her sea eyes and sadness dampening her lovely, feminine features that should at this point in life be filled with happiness and warm smiles and lighter than air laughter, maybe even the soft glow of love to light it up in the right way.
There is none of that and there never will be from how things are going these days, damning her to a life wasted by cruelty and devotion to a job that she always thought herself ready for when in reality, it was meant for the more bitter souls.
The child searches, presumably for the both of them. He doesn’t reach for the touch, instead moving backwards to flee from it. Something about the eyes, something about them that makes him want to recoil and fade into the belly of the sea and experience a time that Sikeax wants so desperately, where no one can find him and he can be himself. Maybe he’s finally becoming like her, finding what makes her think in these ways without intending to.
Life is cruel, he learns in the harshest ways possible without succumbing to it personally.
Chokes and sobs are hushed away with gentle hands that a mother uses to soothe her babes, soft whispers telling her that it’s going to be okay, but Sikeax can’t seem to find a way to tell herself that this situation is going to be okay. Infection has yet to fumigate the child with smells that would surely attract things that none of them would want to imagine, and the blood in the moss and leaves is making her stomach toil like a ship in a vicious sea-bound storm.
Mothers are desperate creatures, she reminds herself, being one. They will do anything for the sake of their children.
The difference between her and this girl’s mother is that she holds life like a torch, guiding light back after the darkness of death has swung its way into a life. She can turn the tides with simple actions and now nearly effortlessly done. The child is fleeing, and she can feel herself sink more.
Please drown me in the sea. I can’t do this. Pleads call for Hobgoblin to let a long, low tone push from his vocal cords, somewhere she can’t see him. He’s gone, leaving her to fight a battle she isn’t sure how to do. She thinks of herself as a savior and a guardian, a keeper of the healthy and the saint of the sickly and dying, keeping them from what might actually have been their real time.
She’s never thought that some may not want her to assist them no matter what she wants. No one has cared to alert her that some are so set upon dying when they feel that there is nothing to push on for. Healers don’t think this way because they are caught up in the idea that everyone has meaning in life and that they can have some sort of god-like control over these things, that they have power over dying.
It kills her, but she has always been persistent, telling herself that no one will die beneath her watch until everything that she can push herself to do can be done.
“I can finish what she started completely, but you have to let me take everything off of your eyes,” Some unseen force taunts her in her head if that image is going to be too much for her, if Sikeax the Sun Physician of the Dragon’s Throat has finally found the patient that she cannot bring herself to cure. But she will not be weak. “so that I can get to the wound. It’ll be gone for good, and you won’t get an infection.” That’ll reach your brain through the nerves and kill you with an agonizing death that no deserves.
“You just have to trust me.” What a funny thing she asks for when she barely has enough trust in herself to have enough courage to push herself through what waits before her.
This is finally it, the one thing that she can’t overcome, in the flesh and in the form of a child.

"If you could hear me then, can you hear me now?"

Sikeax;

i'm missing the beauty in your soul