Sand kicks up behind them as they make their way towards Hypnos, back now turned. Their shoes sink, and they feel as though they’re being taken down, as if the island is whispering, telling her to turn back, but she does not listen. The crowd moves ahead of Hypnos and she takes the opportunity to pull him backwards, thin fingers creating a circlet around an evenly thin wrist. “Hyp,” Alecto pleads, though she does not know if she has a right to. Despite the falsities, what if her words had burrowed into his heart? “I’m sorry.” It bleeds from the back of her throat, to the roof of her mouth, spinning out to the tip of her tongue.
The salt in the air settles something bitter on the back of his tongue each time he breathes in, sand and brine grit he doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to. And here he is three weeks in, still waiting for a familiar voice to carry over on the wind, a familiar number to reappear in his inbox, but all he gets is static and the occasional weather report. Today: partially cloudy, with a 30% chance of acid rain.
It’s an exercise in futility and stupidity in equal measures—observe, if you will, EXHIBIT A: How to Make a House of Nightmares Out of What You Love, Loved, Lost; and Trap Yourself Within—but logic and reason have no place in this disorder ruled by the gravitational pull of an unruly heart. What a pity. What a shame. What a waste to have such a sentimental creature for a child, mother.
He’s trying though—surely that must count for something? surely they must see that? “Do not contact her” is a cautionary tale come too late when his first reaction is always to reach out for something already halfway gone, but now that they’re docked, he’s managed to avoid her shadow in the waters, down the halls, a haunting at the fringe unacknowledged..
..until it’s not. One moment he’s alone in a crowd of faceless paper bodies drifting, the next she’s there, grounding in a way he’s only ever found reassuring with her fingers closed ‘round his pulse. And suddenly, he wants to laugh at it all, how so much has changed and yet, nothing has.
“It’s fine,” forgiveness is his sickness to pass on, the rusty dull edge of it pressing at his gut, threatening an evisceration from what he’s learned to swallow down. Because it’s not fine really, it hasn’t been in a long time. Not when they keep returning with less than they left with, and the House is growing steadily silent and still save for Cerberus’ patrolling steps, and the garden they’ve been trying to grow refuses to take root as though it knows better than them all. “Mom explained.”
Above them, the sky curdles and sinks, the promised rain looming large. They’ll start rounding people up to go back to Pontius soon, before the weather breaks, but he can’t move with her holding him in place like this. Nor does he want to.
“How are you doing here?”—have you forgotten the way home yet? have you found a new home already?
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
dededos
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
