You’re in love with a beautiful boy, a hopeful little thing always striving for the future.
You’re a twisted, selfish creature by nature, really you are, else you wouldn’t be where you are in the first place. But he makes you feel like there’s something else to you, like you’re more than this simmering rage just laying under your skin waiting to explode, more than this resentment that you can’t seem to put away, and, sometimes, he makes you want.
He looks at you and sees the stars, and, sometimes, he makes you wish you could tell him you look at him and see the sun, but there’s this never-ending night threatening to swallow you whole, and he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you—the only good thing that’s ever happened to you—and you cannot do that to him. You don’t want to do that to him, and so you won’t do that to him.
He is light, and, sometimes, he shines so bright that you must look away.
(You want to walk beside him. But that would bring him unnecessary attention from the Thing just laying underneath waiting for a chance to pounce at anything you so much as look at twice, and you cannot do that to him. You don’t want to do that to him, and so you won’t do that to him.)
So you do the one thing you’re best at, and never look at him directly. It’s always on your periphery, from the corner of your eye, in the reflection of the mirror or the mirage on a desert—
Instead you find yourself someone with similar goals and put them on the spotlight, hoping against hope that will be enough to satisfy the Thing which grows restless and reckless the nearer you draw to a close.
He’s bleeding. He’s on the floor holding on to his arm, and he’s terrified and confused out of his mind, and you hate yourself for being the reason that look on his face even exists in the first place.
You act before you can think—
And what’s there to think, really, when you’ve always known there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him, nothing you wouldn’t give to keep him safe.
Before you know it, it’s already time.
You have been waiting centuries for this, already know how this is going to end, and yet all you can think about is how he’s going to take it.
You can’t really say you expected anything else, not when the gods are against you and have always favored those across the battlefield. You have long since resigned to your fate because you saw it coming a mile away even if, for a fleeting moment there, you were naive enough to dare to hope for a different outcome.
And so you’re okay with it, really you are, but then you catch a glimpse of his face before you fade to black, and in that moment you know—
(You’re in love with him, and he’s in love with you, and it’s a goddamn tragedy because you’ve lived for over three thousand years with a sole purpose in mind and a sole path to go down, and, sometimes, he makes you wish you had met him earlier, when you weren’t this broken thing with jagged pieces and sharp edges, when you weren’t a fragment of a soul—his soul—almost completely engulfed in darkness by a pact you made with a demon when you were a desperate little thing wallowing in sorrow and despair.)
—he’s going to do something stupid in his desperation and despair, hopeless little thing wallowing in grief that he is.
He brings you back, that foolish boy who is in love and has nothing to lose and everything to fight for, and you love him beyond measure and with every fiber of your being, and you cannot comprehend what is it that he sees in you whenever you’re not looking at him, but you will be damned if you don’t spend the rest of your life trying to figure it out, making it up to him and living up to his expectations.