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