obscure feelings drabble prompt meme. | accepting!
@scdistik asked for this one too!Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence (which force you to revise your image of what can happen in this world—revising your expectations).
Success is short-lived, as ephemeral as each breath a person takes. Corrin had sworn from the moment the battle was over, once Takumi had retreated, the people of Cheve liberated and told they would no longer be senselessly murdered for disagreeing with King Garon, that everything was fine. But the smile on his face and all feelings of victory were shattered along with his heart. Flames and blood-soaked cobblestones raise wide crimson eyes to the silhouette of Hans, axe in one hand, and a beheaded child in the other.
Everything in him constricts in that moment, including his armored fingers against the hilt of Yato – Gods does he want to kill him in retribution, but he knows the consequences. Peace rides on his shoulders, and indignant as he is, he simply can’t do a thing, nor raise a finger. If he were killed, there’d be little hope that this world full of beautiful people and luminous smiles would ever be liberated of horrors as he was witnessing him now.
As all of these people tied before him are forced to watch, call he can do is stare at them in a tearful, apologetic haze. I can’t help you. I’m a monster for it. A coward.
And oh, when he returns to the castle, everyone in his army knows to leave him be. Though he’d much like to cry more… all he can do is lie half-awake in his bed, exhausted but unable to sleep as agonized thoughts roll over in his over-burdened mind. A boy who’d thought this world a place where everyone could get along without killing was far too naive to be leading people who might die in battle. A very important reality of war has been all but forgotten until now, and it’s hitting him.
Fighting like this, it’s empty. It’s brutality. There will be murder and it’s an unavoidable fact. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel, and people who never deserved a second’s pain are going to have their entire world shattered forever because of him and the rest of Nohr’s army. No wonder his family in Hoshido was so hurt by his choice.
Why can’t this war just end? Let it end now. Can’t he live in a world where no one dies a painful, unfair death?
“I… don’t know if I can do this anymore.”
The world isn’t a pretty place. It’s a beast, it traps you in its clutches and it forces you to make a choice… and that choice may just be someone else’s life. Corrin can still taste the iron in the air, hear the people screaming for his help, when he raised not so much as a finger. He’s so tired…
