closed starter for @prodigxlis
Wine spilled carelessly from the goblet as his wrist went limp, exhaustion catching up with his battered, bruised body, letting the alcohol pour out into white sheets, like blood soaking into bandages, onto the floor. He slumped against the hardwood bed, sitting on the floor where he had lost all will to reach the bed by his second bottle, the blindfold carelessly discarded next to him. He makes no habit in indulging—he knew he could not afford the same negligence as others when it came to himself, that he ought to keep his wits about him, to stand ready, always poised, always vigilant. He was so sick of his own composure. It felt stifling, like a noose around his throat—tightening with each quiet nod spent on others, each second he did not fold into himself and dissolved into despair. The world was bleak, and dark, and cold, and all things soft and beautiful and bright went away with him.
He didn't know how to do this, nobody ever taught him how, and he's not sure how you could. How could anyone endure this? All he ever saw inside that darkness was his face, and all the ways he'd failed him.
He was trying. He was trying, and it wasn't enough. It was intolerable. It was suffocating.
Loneliness was a balm, soothing his injured body—he wanted to scream but there was no sound left. The room was in disarray, things tossed, broken shards scattered, knuckles bleeding against the ground where he'd pounded like a child demanding something from a cold, uncaring universe that refused to listen. But they expected no less from him, didn't they? Succumbing into despair, he fell to his knees begging and crying, and pressed his head against the ground as until there was nothing left inside to spill, and then there was just numbness, this impossible, all-consuming numbness that had spread all through him.
Shoulders bowed in fatigue, his hair spilled in a dark cascade, unbound, slightly disheveled, it covered his chest, and his face, and slope of his shoulders. The robe was reduced to a mess of fabric, carelessly tied, loose crimson slipping open at the chest where he'd scratched himself raw. Sleep evades him once more, prolonging his misery, leaving him empty, floating aimlessly in his dark space, in this nothingness, and he wondered if this was what he felt, too. The thought comes unbidden, and he swallows it down like bile, wanting nothing more than to shake him awake, to steal him from that cruel void, and let it feast on him if it must feast on anything.
Then—footsteps in the hallway.
He cannot trust his own mind these days, and so he doubts what he hears; was that his drunken mind is playing tricks on him again? Then, a knock. His mouth opens to bark a gruff, unceremonious "Go away" and yet no sound comes out. He is undone, he realizes—unguarded, stripped of the careful composure he wore so well for strangers. He cannot answer. He cannot, and he would not, and whatever was behind that door could not compel him, he tells himself. And yet his body jolts up, betraying him, as if something within catapulted it towards the sound with a gravitational force. His feet find the floor before his mind can object, cool stone kissing the soles of his feet as he rises, dragging himself, slow and unsteady at first, then, with an urgency he does not understand. He stumbles forward, his robes slipping off one shoulder as he lunges for the knob ready to snarl and gnash his teeth, but then he stops—like a bloodhound recognizing the scent of its owner, he stops dead in his tracks, and the harshness of him softens. His heart was pounding, a knot in his stomach where rage should be, an invisible string propelling him forward like a marionette.
His hand is shaking as it reaches the door—and he has to hold himself there, still for a moment, and he convinces himself that if he holds himself perfectly still like that, everything would be fine. But it's as if his heart had stopped, as if it was waiting, as if it had been waiting, in anguished anticipation, for whatever was behind that door. His breath catches in throat, and he feels his throat working, trying and failing to swallow. It feels so dry, all of the sudden. He pulls the door open with aggression, all at once, with a force that threatened to tear it from the hinges, hastily, desperately, with his heart lodged in his throat.
He cannot see, but he knows. He knows with a certainty he cannot explain, like a blind, loyal creature, told to go crawl back home; though its feet may stumble through the dark, he knows he could always find their way back to him, even if he could not find himself. He knows it is him, by the cadence of his breaths, and the slow rise of his lungs, by the way his own heart stops, just for a moment, as if it could recognize him by scent alone. He knows him in this moment more than he has ever known himself, and his fingers twitch faintly at his side, his throat working. "...Cian?" he calls from that void, with all the vulnerability of a child, a breath suspended in the air, shallow and unsteady as it cleaves him open, his bright, crimson eyes wet from grief. His hand lifts—just barely—hovering in the empty space where he cannot reach him, as though resisting the urge to reach, afraid—afraid of seeking him in the dark, as he'd done so many times in delirium, and finding nothing there, waiting for him.
