When he jerks awake, it’s to the sounds of screams, of fire devouring everything in its path, to the sounds of his ghosts as they howl and scream inside his head. He awakens to the way the guard at the Oasis had stared up into the sky with empty eyes, her gaze haunting him, and his stomach churns with bile that he just barely manages to swallow back. Somehow, this time, he hasn’t awoken Sam with his nightmares -- how many nights has it been since he had slept through the night? -- and he takes great care not to wake his lover as he untangles himself and stands. In the chill air of the coming dawn, he can feel his joints creak with every step he takes into the library, and he wonders when he had become so old that even the barest nip in the air is enough to make his legs protest, when he had shed the arrogance of youth for the exhaustion of growing older, for the creeping realization that had settled into his bones that he didn’t know anything about himself that wasn’t tainted by rage or marred by ghosts. ‘Who are you?’ A boy with too-big knees had asked in the courtyard of the library the morning before, and he’d choked on his reply, hadn’t been able to spit out any of the words that had come clawing into his brain. ‘A god-killer,’ he’d told Teiran in the cobbled streets of Solterra, his voice breaking around the truth of it all, ‘a monster.’ She had called herself a monster too. ‘The Bastard Prince’, sneered at him in the halls of Zion while his skin had prickled beneath the judgemental stares of Adriana’s devout. ‘A broken weapon’, Adriana had told him. Who was he? The aftermath of violence. The simmering of rage. Had he ever been anything beyond angry, beyond hurting so badly that he lashed out at the world to make it hurt too? He doesn’t remember. He thinks, maybe, he has left so many pieces of himself scattered across the world that he will never be able to bring himself back together, that he will always be hollow and aching where he had once been filled with rage, that he will never find a suitable replacement, but Sam -- Sam still believed he could be gentle. He’d never had a chance to be gentle, had been honed sharp and harsh by Adriana’s cruel words, and yet… Sam still believed that he could be something other than a monster, still looked at him each morning like he had hung the stars in the sky the night before, and he aches for every moment of it. How long had he spent telling himself love was a lie, because all he had known had been hatred? When he looks at Sam, he doesn’t want to reach out and hurt something, doesn’t want to lash out to rid himself of the strange curling tendrils of emotion that have rooted themselves firmly in his chest. With a soft sigh, he finds himself back inside the courtyard of the library, where the birds are beginning to wake up amongst the trees -- he can see them flitting from branch to branch, coaxing each other into full awakeness, and instead of being annoyed he can only find it in himself to smile despite the chaos inside his mind. Sam had shown him where a small bag of bird seed could be found (he thinks maybe Sam hid it there himself) and he reaches for it now, beginning to scatter the seeds across the courtyard and waiting for the first brave souls to venture forth. Perhaps… perhaps Sam was right, and he could still be taught how to be gentle. |
@
