[P] rise up

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war, the saying goes. 

But Elena knows those dogs do not just destroy the enemy, they will vanquish everything in their path.

It had been time to grow up, little girl.

Elena had no longer been allowed to parade through life with those rose colored blinders on, unaware of anything but her own destruction. Elena had seen war, she had seen death, injury, families torn apart. She had seen her own mother whither away to disease. It had been time to grow up. And the little girl, who had hardly been alive long enough to understand what it meant to be a child, never realized what she would all leave behind. 

She knows the metallic tang of blood the instant it hits the air, recoils from it with a faint clench of muscle along the delicate lines of her jaw. It is the kind of scent that snakes into her mouth, settles like copper on the back of her tongue until she is gagging on it, inching back with wary blue eyes. What was she still doing here? She looks like a bird, a golden chickadee, perched as if ready to fly. There is something about her that is wound too tightly, the world too loud and bright and fast.

Elena knows what she is doing here, it is duty, it is her duty. They fight, they tear each other apart, draw blood, paint bruises, sculpt sprains and breaks. And Elena, patches, she fixes, she soothes, she heals. 

These are not the first she had found broken, bloodied, pained. His eyes had stared into hers. “Do I look that hurt to you?” His laughter had been haunting. “You don't let people in, and it will be your downfall, if it hasn't been already.” She had told him. Not realizing, how letting too many in would be her own. 

Perhaps the reason that she is drawn to broken things is because she herself often feels so broken. It doesn’t make sense, because at first glance she is healthy, happy, altogether average. Those blue eyes are bright and beautiful, but look closer and they cloud with bruises, riddled with ghosts. 

But she smiles anyway as her empathy wracks her body with emotions. (She wants to cry with defeat and scream with anger and laugh with victory all at the same time.) “Where does it hurt?” She asks again and again, so when she spots the next, as he moves up in line, she turns to gather supplies, speaking without thinking. “Where does it hurt?” 

Where does it hurt?

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Jask

[Jask]

you have heard the stories about how the dead have already cried, like crushed grass and wilted flowers and memories carved into stone, then forgotten.

The woman at the gate, the same that dropped her shoulder and cranked open the door so that Jask could enter the arena, the same that then watches him stroll back in, bruised and bloodied, has her cheek turned toward him.

She is watching everything: a bug that crawls along the dry stone and sand, a hushed conversation in the corner between a soldier and his brother in arms, the light of a torch as it waves slowly against the limestone wall-- but there is a pocket of space that her eye cannot touch, that she feels her heart stutter as she approaches.

In it, there is Jask, watching blood run down his leg with an expression of vague disinterest that makes her skin crawl. He is not bleeding much, a slow trickle that's already clotting as he must be as a whole, too still to be live and too blank to be real. The Circle knows pain well, and blood, and all things bleak and holy and red. He has always loved the color red: the tip of his horn, the blood red of his eyes, the deep crimson of his robes, and now the wound carved into the skin of his shoulder.

The guard sees Elena move toward him. A part of her wants to say, don't. A part of her wants to step in the way and turn her out-- but when she looks at Jask, for just a second, at the almost serene, almost medititative silence with which he greets her, she knows that whatever she says will not matter.

Jask's emptiness likes Elena, who soaks it up like a sponge. When she, bright and beautiful and as gold as coastal sand, whispers where does it hurt, into the cracks of him, Jask is almost stirred.

He's never been asked this. No one has ever thought to wonder. The Circle does not preach brotherhood, just obedience. In the place of a congregation they would rather have their army. Jask turns to face her in a sweeping motion that the long red robes have to chase, settling against his ankles and leaving tracks in the sand, shallow as it may be in this room.

"I don't know," he answers, simply. Jask wonders if he feels pain. Jask wonders if it is one of the many things now lost to him. Jask struggles to remember where all that pain and anger and fear went before it is replaced, as it always is, with that same placid, holy silence.

"Where does it hurt?" he echoes. There is a hymn in his head, praying endlessly. Many sets of hooves shift in the dark around him. Everyone turns one wary but curious eye to see. Jask turns his eyes-- all three of them-- on Elena's, and Jask smiles.

jask

@Elena

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

Where does it hurt?

“I had to make sure you were okay.” It is what she had said to the man of obsidian, with a blanket of alabaster on his body. She had found him, or rather, he had found her, saved her, in just the knick of time as the rock slides crashed down the side of a mountain. At the time she had thought this a valid excuse for going out there into a mountain storm, for putting both of them in danger. Ask her today and Elena would say she had been foolish. “Where does it hurt?” She had asked him to, kissing his head, the bump that already emerged on the side of it. “Here?” She asked as she kissed it again. It was innocent brushes of her lips, she was too young for him, and he too old for her. It was innocent they both had said. She only wanted to soothe his pain, and he was only too willing to let her. They all have been far too willing.

“Where does it hurt?” She asks him, blue eyes wandering over his body. They were fighting, all of them. Bruises, cuts, sprains, concussions. She spots the blood and her heart flinches before releasing, and she expects the pang of empathy to find her, but there comes nothing. Nothing as she continues to stare at his wound like a child stares at strangers passing outside windows.

“You’re bleeding.” It is an obvious statement, she wants to offer him sympathy, wants to offer him her comfort, wants to offer some sort of emotion towards him, but the emptiness that sits in her heart, it covers everything else and so she can give him so little. She wonders, just for a second, if this is what it is like to die. No, not dying, Elena as felt something like that, has felt something so close. This, this is different, maybe it is what it is like to already be dead. “You’re bleeding,” she says again with more conviction, more emotion, whatever she can salvage against this blank wall of nothing. She lowers her head to his leg to inspect it.

It is that metallic smell, or maybe it is the sight of that bright crimson, or maybe it is the smile on his face. It is something, enough to bring her crashing through the wall of brick and mortar that let her feeling as emotionless as a stone. It passes and Elena finds her light once more. “I’m guessing it must be here,” she says, raises her head to him and looks at him, really looks at him. “I…” What was she going to say? The more she looks at him the harder it is to remember. “Sorry,” she stutters like rippling water. “What was I doing?” Forgotten, everything forgotten in the strangeness of him. Blood. His leg. She was—is a medic and he needs her help. She takes the gauze and holds it close to him. “Is this—is this okay?” She asks him. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.” And Elena has always liked to think that when she makes a promise, that makes it true.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Jask

[Jask]

you have heard the stories about how the dead have already cried, like crushed grass and wilted flowers and memories carved into stone, then forgotten.

You're bleeding, Elena says.

Jask follows her eyes toward his shoulder, a movement just slow enough to catch the eye, a movement that seems like it creaks without making a sound, the sort of crawling patience that comes from only spiders, and insects, and Jask. He follows her eyes to the gash on his shoulder and stares at it almost boredly, the blood welling up and dripping in wet little plinks. It is red until it is a rusty brown past his knee.

For a moment she looks at him and he sees it, the emptiness that he feels: her face is a shield that's protecting nothing, just a void behind both of her eyes. She looks like the canyon he is, yawning and howling s the wind blows through, but still deep, and dark, and red all the same. Jask has seen it before, in his brothers, stripped of their magic like he was. Jask knows, now, why it is that eyes always turn from him.

Any creature that looks like that, still and empty as a haunted house, makes the skin crawl-- even his.

--And then, quick as it had come, it is gone. You're bleeding, the medic repeats, and Jask is still smiling, some polite facsimile of the real thing, when he responds: "I am."

Elena looks into his eyes, two red and the one scarred, milky white. She looks straight at the wreckage that is his face, too many sharp things cluttered together: sharp horn, sharp eyes, sharp scar, sharp bones. Elena looks at Jask and he sees that same emptiness struggling for purchase as she bats it away. It's a valiant effort. He would admire her if he could.

"No  need to apologize," he says. "some of us are forgetful."
There is pity blooming in Jask. He remembers being like this, the struggle to remain conscious in a mind that wants to be anything but. He remembers the clawing fear. He remembers the anger and bile. He remembers fear, like fear never before. It does not cross his mind that Elena looks just like him because she is him, in a sense, that all his holy silence is filling her. it is not something that can cross his mind. She is a kindred spirit, nothing more.

The wind picks up the ends of his robe, floating it off of his ankles.
"Its okay." he says, and then, more truthfully than he has said anything else: "I don't think you can."

jask

@Elena

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

She is not new to the sight of blood.

She is just new to the sight of blood without feeling the pang of empathy she is so accustomed to.

It usually hits her like a shiver down her spine, or a warmth in her face, a chill in her chest. But she can feel absolutely nothing as she stands in front of him, watching the way the crimson creases at his shoulder, little droplets touching down below it with each tiny movement he creates. She watches it, Elena cannot decide if it feels like she has never been seen such red blood before, or if maybe her life has been full of blood and this is just one more. If she could feel something beside this hollowness (she can feel the way the wind blows through her like the forest of Dawn) maybe she would push him away and tell him to leave her alone. Maybe if she could feel she would gather him in her arms and try her best to push emotion into his chest, trap it in between the spaces of his ribs and force him to feel something, anything.

Then maybe all those eyes would stop staring at her.

He is bleeding, still.

It is the only thing, the only real thing that moves and breathes in this moment and Elena latches onto it for some sense of sanity. She shakes that numbing feeling from herself, casting it aside as she moves close to him to begin her work. <“Are you in pain?” She asks with a wince she tried to so hard to keep away from the corners of her mouth as she looks at him. “Do you need something for it?” Her many remedies are at the ready.

“Do you—do you ever forget things?” She asks him. And she thinks he will know what she means. It is not the forgetfulness like someone’s birthday, someone’s name. It is forgetting something more (how to laugh, how to feel, how to speak like something more than the hollow shell by the sea.)

A smile spreads on those golden lips, so soft and so open. It is a smile for him, a smile she tries so hard to hold in despite of it all. She finishes bandaging him, there is hardly any blood showing through it. He will be okay, she thinks, physically. She tries not to imagine the rest. “But even if I could,” she says to him, looking at him like he is full, like he is so full of the life that must have been taken away from him. “I wouldn’t.” She promises. “Do you believe me?” Elena thinks it so important for him to trust her.

It will be later, when that pain creeps back into her heart, and her entire body aches, as if punishing her for forgetting, if even for a moment that she will think about Jask and wish the chasm in his face would open up wide once more and swallow her down into a nothingness so bleak, there is not a color for her to describe it.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Jask

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

“You are all patched up,” se says to the fighter, the warrior, as a chill runs down her spine. She wants him to and she does not want him to go.

She wants him to go—
and she doesn’t.

So she does instead.

She presses the bandage on just a little further before offering him an Elena smile (such, such an Elena smile) and she moves off without a word. She watches the other fights that occur in the ring, sending prayers to no where that everyone stays safe. Though, soon enough there is another who is hurt and Elena moves back to her area to work. She looks him in the eyes and emotions envelop her once more and she feels such relief, such sorrow, such ache, such joy. She wants to cry, laugh, sing, scream with all the fighters who surround her. And then for a split second, she swallows it down and Jask runs as a ghost across her face.

“Where does it hurt?”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Jask