05-26-2021, 06:25 PM
selaphiel
A better question perhaps might be: has she never loved anything enough to let it make her stay?
He can feel her scrutinize him, even through all of this terrible darkness, but he does not let it make him feel self-conscious. He is not embarrassed by how fiercely he loves the things that keep him here. The sister who reeks of death and the mother who works so diligently to sustain whatever life force remains.
“My family is here,” he tells her, his panic still thrumming wildly in his throat. A caged thing, wild. Unhinged. Worse than nothing, he would be lost without them. Aimless. Simply a wandering thing. Adrift with no direction. They are the tethers that keep him grounded. The only things in the world that give him any kind of meaning.
“I don’t want to leave them.”
Never wants to leave them. Except when he is driven away by the stench of death, when he cannot stand it anymore.
Finally, she stops and he abruptly does, too. He folds his wings tightly against his sides and sucks in a sharp breath, still trying in vain to steady the erratic beat of his troubled heart. But she does not look like she is any closer to leaving as she brushes her nose against a leaf.
She is tired of being watched and it occurs to him that he is the one accustomed to doing the watching. He shifts his weight, swallows hard.
“I’m watching you,” he points out, as if this realization might annoy her into leaving.
I just bite my tongue a bit harder
@[Kamaria]