and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding
that never stopped exploding
Septimus is lost in some great tide of emotion, drowned in the undertow of his desperate want, maybe need, and all Andras does it wait.
He knows what it's like, to be drowning. Knows, too, what it is to be called by something entirely other, a force that rumbles out of cracks in the earth and says come here, come home, come play. All his life the earth has been begging him to become something, to be something new, or dangerous, or maybe both. Of course--Andras does not agree out of a sense of camaraderie, or brotherly love. He just... does, and that's enough.
"Well, yeah." Andras says, in the way Andras has of saying kind things in a decidedly unkind way, "You're--" welcome, he starts to say also, but Septimus is already gone, sweeping past in a flurry of red and green and jingling trinkets. Andras tries not to scoff as he rocks back to follow, but he does not try very hard.
For a longer moment than most, everything is quiet, except for the crunch of snow beneath Septimus' feet and the much quieter sound of Andras carefully tracking through his footsteps with his wings folded over his back. The landscape is quiet too, as if out of a dream, with barely even the breath of winter through the trees to let them know it is--and they are--real at all. Outside the stand of trees, fat flakes have started to fall. Ahead, their long white trunks grow closer together, casting blue winter shadows over the ground and each other.
He almost jumps when Septimus speaks again, turning almost too fast.
It would have been fine, not to talk. Andras is quiet. Andras is soltudinous. It would have been fine.
I think I've seen you, Septimus says, and Andras stares thoughtfully at him. "Probably. Call me Andras." he says, and in a rare moment of levity, adds: "Did the glasses give it away?." He does not say warden and he does not say that the word warden makes his skin crawl, just ducks under the low-hanging branches of an oncoming tree as they pass, spilling snow over his neck and lapsing into tense silence.
When it comes, the sound is too loud, almost deafening: like a ringing glass bell from behind a tree, first far ahead, then to the left, then from somewhere behind them. Always the same bone-shattering ding, in the same tone, for the same length of time. The sound of a thing that does not want to be passed by. He does not remember stopping but when he turns to Septimus again he already has.
He cannot quite decide if it's music, or the rattling of a snake, an invitation or a warning.
"I think that's it," he says with his face pulled into some vague, grim expression, "Whatever you're looking for."
@
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
