i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
All of that blood was never once beautiful, he’d heard once, it was just red.
Is his pain beautiful?
Had it ever been beautiful?
He appreciates her sentiment, the kindness in it. A kindness he still does not deserve. He shakes his head and a rueful smile ties up the furthest corner of his mouth as he goes on studying the horizon. It strikes him that he does not remember what the world looked like the last time he’d seen it alive. He hadn’t even registered the weather before he’d ventured down to the beach and stepped through the rift. Would he have paid more attention to the exact way the sun lit up the sky if he’d known that it was the last sunset he’d ever gaze upon with a beating heart?
And this sunset is unremarkable. But he has no way of knowing if it is truly unremarkable or if there is something his lack of a pulse that makes it lackluster. If being a dead thing has somehow drained the world of its color, its splendor.
He wants to tell her that she’s wrong. Sometimes lives are wasted, like his. Because he did nothing worthwhile with his except love someone who would never be his and watch his family die. But he doesn’t. He affords her this kindness, his forfeit.
He is absolutely still, studying the way the sun slips steady toward the horizon, when he feels the daisies stir. He feels them creep up the length of his neck, tips back his head as if he might see them settle around his poll. The sensation coaxes a deeper smile out of him. And then she laughs and, were he alive, it certainly would have knocked the air out of him. What a sound it is.
He turns his gaze back to her face then, studies the way it lights up with the sound of that laughter. He swallows – a habit, still – and tilts his head. Careful not to disturb his crown. They’ll make it up as they go along. Of course they will, he thinks.
“Where do you think you’ll go from here?” he asks then.
