Striking mights and maybes even more

A useless thing called life

It's a biting cold again

He hadn't expected coherent answers. He didn't get them, either. Fumbling over words, fumbling with emotions, Leyra's voice was cracked and fragile, thin-sounding to his ears. Putting innate knowledge, certainty, to words was never easy, and the fact that he was about as thick as a door in this area didn't make it easier. Borderline hysteria and mild panic just helped to reinforce his stubborn stupidity, ears falling back again, flat against his neck. He didn't want to hear. He didn't want to listen. He didn't want to understand. She said he'd torn her heart in two; he couldn't recall doing it. Closed his eyes. The accusation felt unfair, stung; what had she expected? He'd done nothing but the state the truth in the nicest manner he could, and he got an accusation thrown back in his face. As if it as all his fault. An accusation, and a solution; an ultimatum. How could giving her a child possibly solve it? How could it make whole something, when the very rift had been caused by the opposite of the act to heal it? How could she give him the instrument to heal her, in the same breath she told him it was his fault?

Who was he to say she was wrong, to deny her what she thought would cure her?
He didn't want to deal with this.

She was crying, pressed against him, looking at him, her voice shaking; he wasn't looking, his eyes closed and his body rigid, barely listening, barely feeling. She was begging him, in a way so more earnest and desperate than when she'd asked him to kill her; she was begging him.. on one side of it all, he had this — a broken-hearted mare, sad, begging him.. and on the other, he had the power to make it all stop, to make her stop dragging his mind through a meat grinder. He felt raw, as if someone had flayed the inside of his body.

"Are you sure?" he asked her, pained; how cruel of him would it be, to deny her? To tell her that he didn't love her, that he had the means to fix her, but refused to? "Wouldn't it just be a constant reminder of the dream you can never reach?" His eyes opened, slipped down to hers, held them, gently, but sadly. Would she poison the child's mind against him, would she blackmail him, would she take care of it? Would she expect him to take care of it?

Could he bring a child into the world, from all this misery and ruin, from nothing but a form of twisted blackmail?

"Would you still leave?"

Could he bring a child into the world, just to keep her?

He swallowed, tried to think straight, to beat back the roaring darkness in his mind. It was like a void, a gaping hole, where his control and clear thoughts had been, nothing but a whirl of shadows and madness inside his head; he didn't want to deal with this, and he knew what the easy way out was. He didn't have the time to analyze, to look at it all from different perspectives, to consider the implications and complications. It took all of his strength to just stand still, to try and listen to her voice, and to not run away.