You should have told me. I would have understood. I would have…
A younger version of him would have set his jaw, would have fixed her with a hard, almost condescending stare. That self, that younger him was quicker to rage, quicker to burn, quicker to patronise.
This Lyr only feels weary. He looks at her not with emotion, but with fatigue, with a solemn acceptance at his fate. He does not understand how she can assume something so blatantly wrong, but his tired eyes do not show it.. She couldn’t understand, not for lack of intellect but simply lack of experience. Lyr wants to say, one does not go untouched into the mouth of hell. But he is tired of speaking of the unexplainable. One does not walk the graveyard of gods and emerge unscathed. He is still that falling glacier, that swelling sea. He is still awestruck, standing before the sight that changed his world: how long must I drift, he wonders, until the loneliness will end?
Lyr had thought, once, she was his answer. Her voice, the soft, feminine scent of her room—it all takes him back to a place candlelit and sacred, sacred in a way it had no right to be. Lyr remembers her soft touch and softer voice, the stories they had shared with the delicate intimacy of those who feel lost.
“Euphrosyne.” Lyr says her name. He does not look at her again but stares beyond, out the barracks window, where the wind blows and soldiers drill. He works his mouth, preparing to say more, but she calls him again by his full name and he closes his eyes. Oh, it is a heavy thing to hear.
There are old gods, somewhere, searching for his name and all the power within it. The power of life, the power of death—and this, this in and of itself, is what she cannot understand. But he says nothing at all, for a long moment, for so long the silence drags upon him with all the things he should be saying.
Lyr looks away, at last, from the window.
“Euphrosyne.” This time, her name is soft from his mouth, soft as down, soft as a dying breath. “I had to go. The truth would not have spared you that pain.”
Then, rawly, haltingly, one laboured breath and pause after the next:
“I thought I would die... And when I didn’t, I wish I had—I couldn’t bring that back... back to you."
When he closes his eyes to blink he see’s Frasier’s as they bled with newfound immortality, with a god’s soul. When he closes his eyes he remembers blood-red irises bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, the way the light went out of one man's eyes and was replaced with something older than stars.
Lyr almost wonders why it matters where he went, what he did; it seems inconsequential. How does she know, the knowledge of those things will not spare her the pain? How does she—she, of all people—not understand? Lyr feels at once an unbearable urge to reach out and close the distance between them, and another urge, a despicable one, to make the distance even further. There are a innumerable comments he ought make, hurtful things neither truth nor lie—
I was using you the whole time. I just needed comfort. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you—
You never even knew who I was.
Of course I was going to leave. Why would I stay?
But Lyr cannot say them; they would cleave from him the remnants of… of what? But he knows. To say any of it would cleave from him the last, hopeful remnants of his boyish soul, a self more sensitive. The child his mother read poetry to, and his sister loved. It is the thought of them, and all that they made him, that causes Lyr to hold her gaze steadily for the first time—and oh, how he falls into it.
When she mentions her father, Lyr feels a strike of anger. There is something in her eyes he has not seen before—but, Lyr knows, there is something in his eyes that has changed.
He does not pretend to know what has happened to her since.
“Your father was a fool. Women should be soldiers before they should be... be... what you were forced to be before.”
Lyr turns toward her. He moves as if to touch her, and then refrains. There are more things he wishes to say, things that would not cleave her from him but restore their bond:
I have missed you.
I haven’t felt right since leaving.
Your father did not deserve you.
I’m sorry.
Oh, gods—
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
Most of all,
I’m sorry for what I became.
Lyr says, instead, “I’m… I’m glad you’re here… Rosy.”
He closes his eyes. When they are closed, he finds it not so difficult to bare the pain he has caused her. When they are closed, he does not have to acknowledge her so actively as a real person before him. Instead, she can remain a memory, awoken, brought back to life. He does not have to cringe at her accusing, hardened gaze. He does not have to come to terms with... with... with.
Perhaps he does.
He imagines another glacier, crashing into the sea. But in his mind, the image is silent save the beat, beat, beating of his heart.
Lyr loathes himself for the weakness. Oh, he detests it when, trembling, he drops his head almost to her shoulder and closes his eyes. There is an apology in that almost-embrace he cannot say. There is an apology in the way he cannot meet her eyes.
“Things are very different now, Rosy.”
He should say, we don’t need each other like before. He should say, you’re stronger now, and I’m bad for you, I’ve always been bad for you.
Lyr doesn’t.
He raises his eyes and looks at her. “I know you are mad, and will be for some time. But we need each other. Now, more than ever. I will make it up to you. I have to.”
"Speech." || @Euphrosyne
i know i am damned for the pyre
no matter how bright you glow when you call for me
