i feel hope deep in my bones; tomorrow will be beautiful
There is the weight of a thousand truths on his back as he wanders through the forest. There are things he understands and things he does not, and they all haunt the dark behind his eyes. He remembers seeing his parents fight, remembers the way his father disappeared into the night and never came back, and though he catches glimpses of him, the man is more ragged every time, nearly unrecognizable.
He doesn’t understand how all of this is his fault, but he knows that it is. Knows that he is the culmination of too much brokenness and so much ruin, that he is a wrongness his mother loves and his father cannot reconcile.
It makes him feel dirty in a way he’s never tried to explain to his mother. Like the wrongness is a thing that everyone can see, a crawling, creeping blackness smeared over him.
A sound pulls him from his thoughts, and it drops him from such dizzying heights that for a moment it startles him when he turns and there is only filmy dark there to greet him. He exhales, and the sound is a soft uneven snort as his ears prick forward to catch any companions that first sound might be traveling with.
But there is nothing, or at least nothing he can discern, and he is so disoriented that he forgets to ask permission when he slips into the nearest animal to borrow their eyes. For one single second his eyes - no, not his, the eyes of a large elk open on the figure of a delicate girl, and then they shift suddenly to a boy Lumos only vaguely recognizes.
Himself.
He sees a face split by scars, three claw marks furrowed over one empty eye socket. He shifts reflexively and his forelock falls across his face while the elk looks on. He is small, more like his mother than his father, though he has both of their color patterns. The black sabino of Illum and the eggshell blue of Rapture in the fractures between dark and white. He feels embarrassed when he sees the large white wings at his back (the blind have no place in the sky), and nothing when he traces the frost that stretches over every inch of his skin.
But then resistance meets him and he withdraws, and when he speaks his quiet voice holds a low note of apology. “Hello? Is anyone there?” He knows they are, of course, but perhaps they would rather be somewhere else.
Lumos
@[Olena]