07-07-2019, 08:15 PM
For everything he’s been though, he knows little of madness.
He’s been near it – loved it, maybe, if that’s what lay in the wicked gleam in the wolf queen’s eye before she lay waste to him. Was it madness? Or was it simply who she was, and he was too blind to see?
He’ll never know. He doesn’t even know if he loved her – if that’s the word for it – because the feelings are all mixed up in fear and sadness and death, and it’s all muddled, and when he thinks back to that time his chest aches for too many reasons, and there’s no name for it.
You’d think him an easy target, the way he’s drifted, but he has stayed sane throughout. The idle emptiness is what crept up instead, hours of blankness, and maybe that’s it own kind of madness, those stretches where he cannot remember, winding up in places he has no memory of walking to.
And he thinks himself mad, for a moment, because surely this is a vision.
Surely the glass woman who approaches, who looks so like him, whose heart beats in time with is, is a hallucination. A thing sprung forth by a mind that was empty for too long.
Perhaps this is the end, he thinks, and he only feels gratitude.
She speaks, and her voice is as clear as her skin, and his very hair stands on end, because he knows his imagination is not so vivid as this, he could not recreate her in such detail.
“Adaline,” he breathes, saying her name after she says his, except –
Except she says it’s not.
Charity, she says, and he blinks, as if she’ll change form now, and this all was a hallucination, and he’ll apologize to the stranger, and be on his way. But she doesn’t. She is perfectly, exquisitely, Adaline.
“You’re not-” he chokes on the word. He only wants to touch her, whether she’s a ghost or a stranger or a vision.
“You’re Adaline,” he insists, and whether he’s trying to convince her or himself, he doesn’t know, “you’re Adaline. My sister.”
He’s been near it – loved it, maybe, if that’s what lay in the wicked gleam in the wolf queen’s eye before she lay waste to him. Was it madness? Or was it simply who she was, and he was too blind to see?
He’ll never know. He doesn’t even know if he loved her – if that’s the word for it – because the feelings are all mixed up in fear and sadness and death, and it’s all muddled, and when he thinks back to that time his chest aches for too many reasons, and there’s no name for it.
You’d think him an easy target, the way he’s drifted, but he has stayed sane throughout. The idle emptiness is what crept up instead, hours of blankness, and maybe that’s it own kind of madness, those stretches where he cannot remember, winding up in places he has no memory of walking to.
And he thinks himself mad, for a moment, because surely this is a vision.
Surely the glass woman who approaches, who looks so like him, whose heart beats in time with is, is a hallucination. A thing sprung forth by a mind that was empty for too long.
Perhaps this is the end, he thinks, and he only feels gratitude.
She speaks, and her voice is as clear as her skin, and his very hair stands on end, because he knows his imagination is not so vivid as this, he could not recreate her in such detail.
“Adaline,” he breathes, saying her name after she says his, except –
Except she says it’s not.
Charity, she says, and he blinks, as if she’ll change form now, and this all was a hallucination, and he’ll apologize to the stranger, and be on his way. But she doesn’t. She is perfectly, exquisitely, Adaline.
“You’re not-” he chokes on the word. He only wants to touch her, whether she’s a ghost or a stranger or a vision.
“You’re Adaline,” he insists, and whether he’s trying to convince her or himself, he doesn’t know, “you’re Adaline. My sister.”