𝙞𝙩’𝙨 𝙖 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙙 𝙨𝙥𝙤𝙩, 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙫𝙚𝙞𝙡 𝙜𝙧𝙤𝙬𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣. @songsofreason : “ every fog that rolls in brings new faces from the other side. ” from v, to aqua.
𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲. it’s worse in the dark. everything begins to look either evil - like or similar to the people one used to know. this is worse because you know that they are no longer the same, that the thing before you is not a childhood friend, or an estranged child, just an afterimage in a familiar shape. these can do much more harm than the night - creatures with their black teeth and claws. aqua lays with her spine pressed into the purple - black grass and watches the sky. ‘ i know that when a star disappears, a world has died. ’ she thinks. ‘ people can survive this, but most don’t. ’ she did. she shouldn’t have. did any of the lightbearers? the girls in their long dresses and perfect, symmetrical faces? what of their loved ones? for all she knows, their hearts are long gone, snatched away with the halls and meadows that they once frequented, the fragmented pieces of which now make up her own personal world.
the master’s face is striped by the deep, sickly light filtering through the fingers of the hand held up above her. one of them is missing, the ring finger of the right hand. in its place is a useless stump. “ i used to be scared of ghosts. ” she says to no - one in particular. it could be to the man at her side, but she neither looks at nor acknowledges him. doing so may make him disappear. if that happened, she would be truly, utterly alone. every apparition follows its own rules, because the universe is vast and unknowable and all of its individual points do not abide by a plain set of regulations. some apparitions she can talk to directly and they remain on this side. these tend to be the ones that choose to torment her, appearing as terra, or the twisted face of ventus rejoined with the boy in the tendon - suit, or even eraqus in his death throes. others, aqua cannot even look at. acknowledgement of their presence would simply make them turn to water vapor, or whatever else it is that spirits are made of.
limply her hand falls to her forehead. the flesh there is cool and a bit damp. it could be the humidity of this place, which seems to always be dew - soaked and full of spores and amoebas that fill the folds in aqua’s clothes and make her skin slick. the fog is so thick that the world has shrunken down to them and them alone: her, half - dead and moth wing - grey with age; and him, translucent, so close that he could touch her, but he never does. her eyes list. “ but you’re not so bad. ”
all he does is sit there. sometimes, he speaks, though the strain in every syllable and the gasps between punctuation makes it seem, to her, that it causes him a great deal of pain. at least he doesn’t look like anyone she knows, or knew. he doesn’t blame her, either. maybe he should. but her mind seems to understand that it must sometimes rest, so v does not torment aqua. “ the others are worse. they never come when you're here, though. ” she says softly, in place of begging for him to tell all the rest to leave her alone and go back into the silver curtains, at least for a while, because for all her suffering, she has not lost her pride.
