#inexcelsior

[hellhazards]

      Average nights. No worry to the terror behind the city’s borders for the moment, no concerns for what tomorrow would bring. Henry appreciated these days, when the world didn’t feel like it was colliding and merging in on itself over its own people. But his life was no longer average. Henry was now connected to someone he considered a close friend when their connection was more intimate and invading than even what friends should share. And an average night, no matter accustomed he was to them, did not mean a peaceful one. 

Eyes shut, and rattling behind eyelids, he felt wide awake and only five years old again, staring out the window into the black night. This dream never changed, although it sometimes began in the middle or just before the end, and the end was never true to history. He was trying to count the stars in the sky, but none could be seen for the imitation lights beaming from below. His mother and father were speaking calmly, happily to each other. He wished he could stay in this moment forever, stop the dream here because in this part they were still a family. They were coming home from a family dinner. 

Yet his dreams never gave him that wish: a second later something crosses the road, and another car collides into them. He can see his father’s shoulders sitting in front of him, slumped and awkward in the seat, unmoving when he calls to him. His mother, he can see right into her eyes, the same echoing back into his without recognition with cuts and debris along her face. If the dream mocked reality, he would sit here and wait, watch his mother’s image flee from him as the police pull him out of the car an hour later. Instead, she moves, just before she screams and comes after him, waking him to scream into the night and see the image still before him at the foot of his bed.

But it’s not just him anymore, not the two of them. Rose. He didn’t know if she witnessed it, felt the terror of a boy’s world unwinding before him. For once, instead of focusing on the disguised demon before him, he rose from his bed and went to her.

@inexcelsior

[hellhazards]

“Deafening silence.” He read the term within numerous book, the author’s attempt as describing the absence of sound to be devastating as if it was anxiety inducing, noticeable and uncomfortable to experience. The man rarely understood why silence needed to be filled, why so many were insistent on small talk as if the presence between them wasn’t enough; but then, he rarely understood anything he wasn’t good as either. With the sky focusing in and out, wanting to see stars in the void of black, silence was peace. Silence meant he was left alone, a wish he constantly had in a crowded room or in the midst of the witching hour when his eardrums would shatter. 

He was surprised that no specter was present to taunt him as he lay, or more surprised he was left to die. Maybe she thought he was dead-- his breathing was so shallow it could fool anyone without the proper senses to detect his struggle for life, the slow decline from it. It was quiet, and it was peaceful. No screeching sounds in ears, no looming feeling of doom. Or he believed that first. The stars finally came into focus, or his eyes finally opened, and the moments of bliss were an illusion his mind made in attempt to block out the pain. The more he became aware of his surroundings, the clearing where he fell, the more he became aware of the lacerations across his body. It was if the woman (the woman who wasn’t Rose, Rose would never act like, change personality like that), had drawn him in with a morbid curiosity to understand “death by a thousand cuts” with magic, but only had managed to ten or so, he didn’t know, before becoming bored or thinking her time better elsewhere, off to lure another in. 

Hopefully it wasn’t Rose, hopefully the stars were looking kindly down on her more than they were on him. They were his only company, as the silence that meant no other was around failed to be a comfort. He wasn’t thinking when he called out: not if the woman had actually disappeared and was waiting for a final blow, not about the cuts of various different depths spreading pain across his chest for both. He wasn’t sure if the sounds coming from his mouth were words or basic sounds conveying his pain. Henry just tried, and hoped soon, whoever may come, he wouldn’t be alone.

@inexcelsior

[hellhazards]

☼

☼ - a person who knows most of the muses secrets

His grandfather knows and has been watching Henry since he was a boy. Keeping his distance, Henry doesn’t know the man by face or that he’s alive but the eyes Henry feels on him are more than illusion.

[hellhazards]

His family had been hexed, he was sure of it. His parents, or even his grandparents, must have challenged someone greater than their capabilities or pissed off some who-knows-what that cursed their name and spread misfortune in the blood down to him, faded simply to bad luck. Whether it was his own misfortune or at the expense of others the concept followed him like a sickness without a cure. This week featured awkward introductions, specifically the reintroduction of them. He attempted to keep his head down, lifted his shoulders to hide features and make himself smaller and with a dead straight gaze and quick steps, he was sure to pass by the flower keeper without recognition or address to what happened a little over a day prior.