Worth & Weakness
He couldn't sit still in that infirmary. He kept looking at the window. Kept imagining the long drop that waited on its other side, the sheer clif-face on the outer perimeter of the city.
What if he stepped off the edge, and didn't leap to stop the plummet? What if he let the cold and the dark embrace him, the same as it had felt in terrible (wonderful) dragonflight?
You don't deserve to be alive. Monster.
His own thoughts hounded him, chasing away sleep. Even the cloying soporific droughts weren't enough to dull those senses. The internal ones he'd trained over such terrible pains to seek and destroy weakness in himself.
Only now, at the uttermost end of the Dragonsong War…. the weakness was everything. Was fundamental to him. In the blood, perhaps, the selfsame blood which bound him to the murderous history of the men of Ishgard. Too stupid to suss out lies for truth, too blind to seek answers instead of revenge Every ancient insult of his mother he thought time had eroded out of his memory came rushing back like the sonorous echoes of a chapel bell clamoring through a morning street. Every protest of his mentor, every sharp rebuke of the knights who boxed his ears when he was little better than a stunted starveling fighting... fighting..
He sought out the Forgotten Knight. Days past the last of the fighting, he looked like any dozen men who crowded it wall-to-wall now. Injured, every stitch of garment askew, lank silver hair a snarl of tangles.
It had been long and longer since he'd sought this kind of answer. He recognized only a few, and kept his elbows up, warding off friendly faces or claps on the back, upper lip partly curled off his teeth as he hunched over a drink that the bartender, wisely, never let run dry.
