[private] you'll wish for time to turn back around

[elio]

elio

some say I should learn to cry but I only learned how to fight
and I know everything must die but nothing fades like the light

Oh, Elio should've known. As he should've always know: from a child to a teen to grown man, he should have known that the shadows he imagined tickling his heels would finally catch up to him. They find him with a dark, glorious, bloody fury. They pick his bones clean, build relics with what's left of his easily surrendered body.

Oh, you should've known, Lannister had crooned to him once. Rolled onto their back and laughing like Elio didn't have a real world to return to, his son teased him about not seeing him beneath a particularly large palm leaf. He had popped out suddenly--the screaming AHHH enough to make Elio lurch backward--but couldn't keep the composure of a scary monster. Into fits of laughter they had both burst. I should have known.

But how could he have known anything? The painful reality Lio longs to escape from is that he simply cannot know what he does not know. And what, exactly, should he have known? Lost in the seemingly endless spirals of his fabricated suffering, Elio loses the meaning of what he punishes himself for.

"Oh," is all the golden man can rasp at first. He lifts shameful, stormy eyes up to Nash's, wondering if he can offer himself the same forgiveness his brother so readily gives.

"It's good to see you, too, Little Feather," comes the painful admittance. His tongue is like sandpaper and his heart wrenches with every consonant in the old nickname. But just speaking aloud the truth (that Nashua is Little Feather and Elio is Fire Wing, and there is nothing besides wicked magic to change that), is enough to lighten the rainy weather that dims everything he sees. The thunderclouds behind his eyes begin to clear and for a moment--one crisp, cool moment--he forgets the lashings he wears on his back. He forgets the scars on his face and body. Forgets the expectations only he forces himself to live up to.

"Nashua, I--" Elio begins but stops himself, so terribly uncertain. "How is Taiga? Lilliana? Yanhua? Tell me what I've missed." Such rushed words come as an obvious distraction: perhaps even word vomit will unearth more normalcy. Perhaps within the stories of others living while he can barely keep awake, he'll find a home.

@[Nashua]