DATE | JULY 27, 2020
LOCATION | A COFFEE SHOP IN QUEENSLAND, NZ
WITH | @daringdynamo
the thought sits just underneath the surface of his skin, and he worries at it like an itch.
what, exactly, are you doing?
for arguably the first time in his thirty eight years of living--he doesn’t really have an answer. he only has pieces, fragments that keep cutting into the skin of his palms, leaving individual scars as reminders of all the ways he had failed that day. her body, slack and so clearly lifeless. the weight of a sniper rifle with a full magazine, not a single bullet expended. the feeling of his ribs being peeled back one by one as the realization set in that cosmos--cesco, was trapped in that tomb with her, beyond where the scope of his rifle, the blade of his knife, could reach. the empty hospital bed that followed.
he is no stranger to grief--there are whole rooms in his heart painted with the blood of those he had lost before he’d even had a chance to know them--he is no stranger to death, either. he is practiced in the art of swallowing them down without choking them back up like bile--which means that the question remains. what, exactly, are you doing?
he doesn’t know--as terrifying as that is to admit. he has no idea what he’s doing, where he’s supposed to be, if there’s a battle that he should be waging--he just knows that in the same way the sun is pulled in constant orbit around the moon, so too is he pulled towards evren. who else, in the entirety of the earth he has sworn to put on his shoulders like atlas, to protect at the cost of his own life, would understand this?
you wanted me dark, you wanted me broken and jagged, he thinks to himself, as he brings his coffee cup to his lips. so here i am. make sense of it.
“do you know how many dark haired women with tattoos and murderous glints in their eyes i had to go through before i found you?” he drawls as she approaches, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “none. seems like a flaw, for someone whose very job it is to remain in the shadows.”