@forgedwild said: ❝ the truth is stranger than my own worst dreams. ❞
August’s words echo Samuel thoughts, thoughts he has no idea how to express as he stands here feeling like his whole world is starting to crumble.
It’s real, it’s here, right in front of them; the cabin Samuel has seen in his waking thoughts and deepest dreams. Yet the garden Samuel envisaged was luscious green, with flowers planted in each and every colour, is dead and now mostly covered in desert sand. The cabin too has been partially engulfed, sunk into a dune that soon threatens to consume it entirely. This place has clearly not been loved or lived in for years.
Dazed, Samuel slowly walks forward to run his hand over what remains of the wooden frame, feeling its sanded shape, appreciating the grain. He remembers felling these trees with August and the trouble they had painstakingly transporting them out here by wagon. He recalls laying the foundations, breaking their backs and working together, deep into the night, desperate to make the place watertight during a sudden autumn storm. He remembers the bed they built out of the same wood and the fevered night they spent christening it together. He remembers August teaching him to cook rabbit stew in their kitchen and the fierce summer all the crops died and they had to irrigate and replant all over again. He remembers quiet days spent doing honest work and peaceful nights spend in August’s arms. He remembers trading rings of the Blacksmith’s own design and how proud he felt to call him husband. Worst of all, he remembers remembering. There are scratch marks on this wood, just above where his fingers currently scrape mindlessly against the grain. They have been here already, witnessed this ruination once before, only to forget.
As Samuel steps back, he stumbles, shock evident on his face as he falls down into the dust. The life he craves, the life he’s always dreamed of, it was his, theirs and yet these memories do not feel like they belong to him, as if he is being forced to live vicariously through them, rather than being able to claim them as his own. How many times have they been here together, how many times has he been forced to bear witness to these remains, this relic of the happiness that was torn from them, a happiness he can only graze with his fingertips, that turns ghostly in his grasp?
“Don’t...don’t touch me!”
He is scrabbling in the dirt, heels digging in the dirt as he backs away from the structure, the sight of which is causing him more fear and pain than he’s ever known. He can barely process this, it’s too much - how did this come to be, how can this possibly be the truth? There is silence as he pulls his knees to his chest, staring off into the distance towards nothing and everything. It is then it happens, a break, something inside him shifting, like a door slamming shut on his sentience, to avoid the inevitable backdraft that will devour everything in its path – a fire born of confusion and contradiction that threatens to burn him down. His system is protecting itself.
Standing up, his posture is suddenly strangely straight, his expression neutral as he calmly stares right through the remnants of the place they once lovingly called home.
Turning towards Gus, he offers him a soft smile as he mindlessly dusts himself down. His eyes are still slightly tear-stained but disturbingly his face no longer shows any sign of distress. “Doesn’t look like anything to me.” He states flatly, turning away from the dilapidated cabin as if it is merely an empty patch of desert and nothing more.
“…we really should get back to Sweetwater Wilder, I promised to see the Sheriff in the morning.”
