She woke up in the middle of the night, throat parched and slumber still coating her half-opened eyes. Her bangs were matted to her face; a light sweat prominent at her hair line. ❝Mister Gilgamesh? Is that you?-❞
Have you come back?
Sera stopped mid-sentence, the breath fleeing her body as the echo of her voice rebounded back to her from the walls. The words felt like a trigger.
What hurt the most was the cruel distinction between a familial closeness and the deafening distance. She held onto this notion of forever, when in essence, nothing was permanent. All that was constant about it was sadness. Gilgamesh was not her father after all, not really. An explanation others would accept would take a lifetime of comprehending and sorting out the littlest of details. Sera could easily say there was much more to the King of Heroes then one would perceive at first glance.
He had worked his way down to her core and brought out something in her she had never thought possible, how easily he could stir her from her own reluctance to act. Every time she talked to him, she could feel her heart strings pulling her voice box open and releasing a melody she hadn’t let out for years. He made her want to untwist the knots of her tongue and listen to her own voice again. The shaman felt herself regress to a normal girl instead of a being created in a lab meant for nothing more than to be sacrificed. She craved the approval which naturally came in the smile he gave. He was a constancy in a life otherwise so scattered, unpredictable, and chaotic.
She had a power, close to what a god possessed, literally at her fingertips, but the lingering fear still ate at her. She concealed the one way she could defend herself if only to keep history from repeating. Up until recently, a part of her reasoning was to keep herself alive, keep herself uninteresting to others. Sera knew Gilgamesh’s abhorrence for the gods, for dishonesty…What if that’s why he left? What if it was her fault? The second he found out, he abandoned her?
To use that same power she refused to access needlessly to uncover his location was likely to be met with disaster, but what else could she do? Her eyes drifted shut as she focused on the data stream, feeling every separate line of code, the electrons moving within them, the vibration of the atoms. Gravity felt like it doubled in a second, and she braced herself for the impact of the entire database opening up to her. Hundreds of citizens, thousands of entries. She wandered the netscape in a hopeless haze. Where? Where could he have gone?
Concentrating on tracing a point of origin, her hands were frantic but precise. A flick and codes flickered away so swift that all they left was a trail of light. She pressed upon a hologram and gestured for it to expand.
No records found...
The way she foresaw these little concerns tweaked her anxiety for the worst. Then it settled in her heart, buried itself right in the middle of it and she allowed herself to lose her composure; to be free from the reluctance which divulged in her chest. In her delirium, the sobs that shook her sounded nothing like her own. She could see the dark blurs at the sides of her vision beckoning.
She had experienced life and death. She knew torture and loss; the eroding effects of hopelessness and what it felt to have it spiral so far, but nothing prepared her for this pain. The people in the city thought themselves immortal in a sense, death only a temporary hindrance. They didn’t know the true danger of being wiped from existence in a few keystrokes. It was a bitter truth that despite the power they held- no one was invincible, even she was susceptible to the same fate. When Gajeel disappeared it wasn’t something she fully acknowledged. Fully grieved. Ignorance was bliss after all.
The petite shaman began to draw parallels. Of those close to her, who would be next? Was there a pattern? Was this a test?
There’s a wrecking pain in her core and Sera severed the fusion, ejecting just as her heart threatened to stop beating. Pixels scattered in erratic, jagged forms as the girl held a pillow to her chest to help rein herself in. She attempted sleep in the arms of the couch, spine curled like a crescent moon, but it was a lost cause. She couldn’t sleep. Not with that one thought plaguing her mind.
He won’t be returning home.
At least not how she remembered him.