The feeling of his lips on yours drowns out the sickly inferno raging under you skin, your body battered by waves of agony. You wish you could die before this moment ends. The memory of the aching hollow in your heart as you sat on the cold rotunda floor taunts you. His love and admiration mocked you from all around. Plaster and paint sit by the final unfinished panel, dry and rotten.
Then the pain is gone, and your soul goes with it. A new agony claws inside your chest, twisting and ripping at your guts and bones. Fingers of dry ice crawl down your ribs, catching in the cracks and raking every caress, every kiss, every kind word from your very bone marrow. Talons of despair rake against your spine, pulling out the shards of murmured nothings and secret moments. The breath that escapes your lips is ice cold, bitter and broken as you feel the light go out in your world. Then he is gone.
The ache envelopes your heart again, crushing it with the weight of what you know will have to come in time. You pray for the release of death, unconsciousness, anything to take this profound feeling of emptiness from your chest. Your newly missing arm doesn’t even register as a guttural scream rips from your chest. You double over onto your knees, screaming with the same animalistic pain you’ve only ever heard from something in its final, violent moments.
You are hollow by the time your companions reach you, staring blankly into the sky as the Iron Bull pulls you into his massive arms. It feels worse than the pain. Feels worse than the explosive agony of the anchor blast, with its green fire ripping through the very cells of your arm. He took even that from you.
The realization is harsh. No matter how much your heart burned for him, how your skin felt electrified every time his fingers brushed over it, how your souls felt like one with the entwinement of your bodies, you knew how this had to end. The rage slowly seeped back in then, burrowing into and covering over every raw crack and crevice clawed into your heart like armor. Wrath cauterizes your wounds, a fury that you now cling to like a child to her mother’s skirt. It is all you need to sustain yourself.
It is all you have been left with.