[P] all that's left is a ghost of you

[Seraphina]

WOULD THERE WERE A FESTIVAL FOR MY FEARS
a ritual / burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in / before it is too late.

Once, she might have been delighted – or something like it – to see him. Now, she doesn’t quite feel anything. Dull surprise, maybe, and a little bit of something that is not quite dredged-up hurt. When he disappeared, she didn’t ache for it, precisely. She hadn’t had time for that; and she didn’t know him well enough for it besides, though she didn’t think much of it at the time. She was young and lonely, burdened with a weight that was probably too heavy for her young shoulders, and she was oh-so (far too) easily enchanted by the notion of someone who might be able to understand her, ugly gnarls of a history and all. No one had ever sent her flowers before, or told her anything lovely or sweet, or written her gentle letters. She thinks that a part of her must have inherited her mother’s more foolish inclinations; she does not remember much of Angelie, now, but she knows that she was a woman who loved sweet fairy tales and fables, the ones with handsome princes and courteous knights in shining armor. Now that she was older, she could understand how she must have felt, though she knows just as well that it is foolish. When you are at your most hopeless, you long for someone – perhaps anyone - to save you. You imagine the handsome young gentleman, the one who can say pretty things, the one who seems to have stepped out of a picture book – the one who will save anyone, even you. You long for the flowers, to catch their eye from across a crowded ballroom, for soft words, an affectionate stare, perhaps even for the poetry. Most of all, you long for the happy ending.

She knows better. (The truth of the matter is that she probably always has.) It’s probably of no use to hope for endings at all.

There is the clack of her dark hooves on stone, and a faint, surprised twitch of her lips. Her eyes scan his frame thoughtfully, and she decides that he does, indeed, look quite different than she remembers. Regardless, he looks well, and she finds, for whatever it is worth, that she is glad for it; and the way that he says her name makes her feel something like relief, because she feels, most often, like the world has forgotten her, alongside everyone in it. It is still so strange to be greeted warmly.

(After all – she died unmourned, unburned, unburied, forgotten, but for two.)

Her gaze locks on his, odd eyes settling on his own.

“Renwick,” she says, in a voice that feels more polite than it does warm. Still, her tone is genuine when she asks, “How have you been?” Because she does wonder. (Because some part of her still wants some sort of explanation, which would be somewhat like closure.) Because, more than anything, she had thought of him as something like a friend, and that lingers – even if what accompanied it seems to be gone.

She’d far rather talk about him than herself, at least – about him, not the new scar on her cheek, or the tiredness carved into her skin in the form of near-perpetual dark circles, or the unhealthy slightness of her frame. And there is a part of her, though she might be glad to see that he still lives, that wishes that he could not see her in kind. There is a certain way that she is tired of feeling like a disappointment, a certain way that she is tired of straightening whenever she catches someone else’s eye; a certain way that she would like, more often than not, to be entirely alone, without anyone else to live up to.

(Of course – she never will be. Ereshkigal’s blood-eyed stare is trained on her, where she perches on a nearby rock, and, when she catches her gaze, the crooked tips of her beaked mouth curve up into a smirk that barely shows her razorblades of teeth. The demon is the one entity in her life that is perfectly inescapable; the sole creature that will not leave her and will not abide by being left.)

But she does not even acknowledge the demon, now. She simply regards Renwick, and she pretends, for a moment, the demon – and everything she signifies – does not exist.

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@Renwick || <3 ||

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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