"I've found out that sound without soul cannot move people's hearts. Then you must have been indebted to several souls from your near-death experiences─ otherwise, you wouldn't ever come back."
His next breath caught in his throat.
The door, prized open with metal teeth, barely clung to its hinges—leaving only the open air between himself and this scared, disheveled visage that only vaguely resembled the person he once knew as B.
His hands wrapped around the handle of the axe, a single word prickled up his spine when he meet the wild eyed man’s gaze— ‘deranged’
The inertia of the moment brought everything to a screeching halt, no longer able to consider the possibility of him being dead.
“ Oh, God. ” The thought formed somewhere out of reach of his tongue but his hand came to his mouth as though there was sound to hold back.
Tangential awareness of the events that transpired in his absence became full-bodied tangibility, vivid and definitive, the aftermath standing in front of him. The evidence of time was suddenly so unobscured, it was overwhelming to process in the seconds the past was all coming into collision with the present. This wasn’t simply the person who he had known as his roommate with several years more life lived, this person wasn't merely a few scars away from who he once knew —this was an escaped convict with a definite body count.
Shaking fingers came away from his face.
His delicate blue eyes could not look away from the vicious scaring across the bridge of the man’s nose. Choking on the impetus to devise his next action, he was struck still and silent.
He wanted desperately to stop imagining what it might have been like when the flames crawled across his face.
The gleamer of light off the blade caught his eyes, the heavy head of the axe in B’s hand, not yet had he considered the possibility that he could be in danger of being struck with it…
The accusation rattled somewhere under the bruising and cuts that did not heal— you must be indebted to fate for all those attempts to escape destiny through death.
" ... I-i-" He stammered, trying to form a thought between clash of fright and latent compassion- Finally, outmaneuvered, his foiled attempt to flee and escape this confrontation had left him without explanation for his unexpected appearance, his return and revival, he let the words die in the silence between them.
—What have you done ... ?"
