@audaciiae
Camilla takes a step away from him. Her gaze was terrified. "No, Henry," she said, "don't…” and he is smiling at her. "You think I'd hurt you?" he said. "Come here." She went to him. He kissed her between the eyes, whispering in her ear, he presses the barrel of his gun to his temple, it clicks once, too quick for even pain but then Henry wakes with a start, beaded with sweat and an iron hot agony splitting between his eyes.
Another headache, that was all. The nights are bright here in the summer, the dark nearly green like a distorted photograph, and Henry tries to fixate on the bray of cicadas and the damp air wafting through the ajar window, chasing the agony through corridors in the back of his skull. He is drumming for his pills in the nightstand, crushes two, thinks better of it, than four between his teeth, a sour powder on his tongue. It is not so fast fixing, but the placebo is a welcome reprieve.
Camilla.
Her name jars through the pain and he is abruptly somber, staggering to his feet in nothing but an undershirt and briefs, nearly out the door before he hesitates, thinks better of it, and crudely drapes and ties up the front of his robe, for her sake. The night seems quieter once he is out into the hallway, eerie and heavy in a way that had never bothered him before, but seemed all together more haunting knowing Camillia’s heart is tremoring somewhere in the black of his home.
His paranoia is eating him alive these days.
He fumbles in the dark, curses under his breath and parts the curtains to cut a beam of midnight through the pane, illuminating Camillas’s hair, a sea of blonde spilling out around the porcelain of her features. Her cheeks are flushed, he can tell even in the dark, and he is knocked numb and stupid at her beauty, as he always is for a breath or so, her features too sharp and ancient and beautiful to allow to be committed to memory.
Henry is on fire, his breath heavy, sweat beading his brow, a dull knife slicing through his skull. None of it is as alarming as that dream, familiar as a memory, and Henry can feel that room around him, the warmth of his own blood spraying his face, an inevitable funeral march twisting in his stomach. His jaw tremors slightly, fingers moving to trace and clasp around her jaw.
“Camilla–“ he begs, just barely above a whisper and for what? He does not want to wake her, but cannot bear to be in the quiet alone, pressing his lips into the spring of her hair.
