@ashesrise , Fawkes said: " get used to it, you mollycoddle. you're stuck with me forever. "
there’s palpable sarcasm in her voice, dripping with sorrow. the jest doesn’t land as much as It pierces through him, and Gellert is suddenly jolted upright and wide awake, sitting on the cold slab that had become his bed, frayed blanket pooling in his lap.
colour pours through the single window, yet cement pours down his throat, gritty and slow, ripping apart his softer tissues. Gellert chokes.
“ Fawkes, ” he croaks, and the wet cement in his voice suddenly hardens. his voice cracks into a croak, like a coconut split clean in the middle. why are you here wrestles with the non-reality of you cannot be here. the weight of it sends his ribs flying into splinters. there’s a trembling in his body he hasn’t felt for decades ( so he says, so he says, but all of his dreams are wrapped in a haze and red velvet and his own screams )
“ Albus. ” the name is a breath. fog in the cold. dissipates like life from a corpse in the silence between them. he can’t breathe. ( somehow, his thoughts are ripped out of him and carried back to earlier times when life seemed fair and was so fair, as it lay spread out before him, all colour and possibility and promise, pink as dawn. it’s as if his last, tentative grip on reality, slips from his wet fingers. )
“ he— ” he can’t say it, he can’t speak the words, because there is no such notion as a world without you inhabiting it, somewhere.
dead, his mind screams. his tongue is too thick to form the syllables.
Gellert fights it, grapples for words.
instead, his bony fingers grasp the sides of her face, framing it in white.
instead, his throat constricts on a sob.
instead, his vision blurs as he stares, unblinkingly, into her eyes until he feels needles in the back of his.
