It begins in a room that smells like sweat and vinyl. Disdain is laced in your blood like poison, rotting you from inside out. Anger at the tips of your fingers, barely held back in. You take a step forward, evaluate him, decide he wonât last more than a week. A broken shell of a human being will crumble with a forceful touch.
Stay alert. No. Pay attention. No. Recognize this. Recognize him. Recognize that all youâve ever aspired to be was someoneâs hero and then he opens his mouth to say something as dangerous as needing you so he could be anything worth noticing ( which is a lie ) you swear itâs like putting on a cape or saving yourself from utter disaster. Every nerve in your body lights up and you think your ears redden and your eyes start to sting and there are so many people of authority in the room that you donât know how to channel any of this, whatever it may be, into something less pitiful than a crooked, horrible smile at the ground. You feel like crumbling but itâs not in a way youâre used to. Until now itâs been to mourn, itâs been in front of graves and with the blood of allies on your hands. Youâve sat at the end of an infirmary bed and wanted them to just leave you alone long enough that you would somehow perish of neglect in the small facility they were keeping you in. You have knelt at the side of hospital sheets and regretted every single moment you werenât there to protect and serve like you promised you would be, thinking perhaps you could exhaust yourself into nonexistence if you spent every waking hour at his side to make up for the times you were not.Â
This is a different kind of feeling, so extremely different that you canât seem to process it until the voices that flare up in punctuation to Howonâs statement, simmer back into silence. All attention points to one man directly in front of you with glasses pushed high atop his nose. He appears tired or aggravated or both and you respond to it with teeth clamped down, vice-like into the side of your cheek, not knowing what else to say even though youâve wanted to speak up for months. You have imagined what this day would be like once your reserve broke, and how you would shred yourself of your hollow dignity if it meant you would get to work alongside your superior again, but now thereâs silence instead of vehemence and this isnât at all like what you imagined it to be. The man looks at you directly, thumbs pinched in a telltale fashion between his eyes. The sound of breath expelling from his chest is as threatening to you as raised kagune, a bloodied mouth, a promise of destruction. You wish you could step closer to Howon but you remain idle in your spot, awaiting words that may never come.
âSo be it.â
You try to keep yourself from losing your balance this time, once surprise graces you in its laborious delay. Everything seems to come to a point and then a fragment of speech comes barreling through to shove you from it. Each exhale after that could contain the sky, in your chest would be the stars suspended. Heâs next to you, warm and valiant and yours again. Talented and deserving of his honor, and yours again. Both investigator Lee Howon, Phobos the god of fear, and yours â just Hoya â again. âYou will not regret this decision,â you hardly manage to reply, jaw still slack with thawing shock. You take a step back, and then another, retreating with hesitance although youâre sure there is no conversation left to be had. You came in and roused a gentle fire before forces that who would no sooner chew you up and spit you back out into the streets a commoner, but instead they took time to listen to both of your harmonious pleas as pathetic and disjointed as they might have been. You decide you wouldnât spend any more time wasting what little sympathy was granted to you.
Answers have been given. You got what you wanted and itâs still a concept floating around without roots. You can say it to yourself over and over again but somehow, when you step back inside of the elevator and hold the door open with one hand, thick rings clicking into the metal, you still can feel the lurch of a smaller voice inside of you that wants to keep fighting for it. Perhaps this is a small repercussion from not following after him when he left. Perhaps this is the part of you that wanted to run through the crowd when he let go of your hand a year ago. You wanted him to tremble under the idea of losing you just like you feared losing him, and simply turning his back wasnât enough of a goodbye. You wanted him to mourn you. You wanted to mourn him. Years standing side by side told you that it would never come. Like Howon, you proved to be a pillar in the face of overgrown sentiment. You could stand before death with hatred turning your blood into magma, could watch yourself drowning in the opened floodgate of your own emotions and there would be no tears shed. The sanctuary of your own mental stability could decay from the inside out but you would never let them see it touch your face.Â
He meets your eyes again, as earnest and purposeful as youâve come to recognize from him. You see how tired he his underneath his unmoved expression and you wonder if he can tell how the past year have changed you too, taken a little bit of your normalcy away and replaced it with jaggedness. Agitation. You wonder if either of you will have the heart to say anything after the doors close, once again tied by a title as if the distance had never happened in the first place. You let him brush past you and situate himself, fingers uncurling from the door and promptly shoving into the pockets of your winter coat. On cue, the space once connecting you both to quite possibly one of the hardest tasks you have completed in your ongoing careers, dissipates into a steel wall that distorts a fuzzy reflection of your physiques, drenched in a jaundice light.
Descent begins. You open your mouth to speak but canât seem to find the right words. Â
annaxmalina
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
dededos
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
