OFHYOUTON said: ‘ tell me all about you. anything. everything that i have missed. ’
┋ 蒼炎⋙—.❝I ....can’t.❞
The words were murmured through a palm spread wide across the dimming vestiges of what may have once been the boy to whom this beautiful woman addressed. Anxious brows bowed beneath the force of his sudden trepidation. She wanted to know about her son, not this grisly lost phantom. Aches and rage. He hadn’t solved anything, yet. He didn’t have anything to say to her, yet. And he didn’t want her to see him, not as he was.
His survival ᴱⁿᵈᵉᵃᵛᵒʳ had ruined ᵏᶦˡˡᵉᵈ her ᵗᵒᵘʸᵃ son.
Maybe when the world was good and remade, and the machinators and supplicants were ripped from their unworthy pedestals -- and when the blood of those mendicant heroes were spread like a balm across the hurts of those who failed to feed their vanity, maybe then he could tell her who he was, and what he had done. And even if he couldn’t return her son, he could at least stand before her with a fresh, clean, world reborn in hand; an apology for being first, and not enough. For not being strong enough to protect her, or her children from the man who should have been protecting her and her children. He could have stopped it, if he’d been more capable, right? That’s what Endeavor had meant, wasn’t it? By showing him how thoroughly he was passed over. Replaced. Twice. And on the third application... everything was even worse.
Right now, that same weakness still ate at him from within, gnawing at the underside of his skin, turning it fragile and paper-thin; like dying autumn leaves sutured to his flesh to remind him that he was on borrowed time. Right now, he was just a grudge comprised of scar tissue, violet accusations borne to light, and metal teeth bared against the system of “heroes” that dictated who was fit to thrive, and who would be regulated to a life of withering away.
How could he look her in the eyes, before it was all made right?
❝Not yet. Give me a little more time, yeah?❞
Gentle, almost desperate, he tried to bargain for invisibility.
