how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
He can hear his own pulse in his ears. Feels it like the ocean tides that wash up against the insides of him until he is certain he will bleed out on the shore. Still, he doesn’t run away, even though he considers it. Wonders just how quickly he could fade back into the shadows and the fog until there is nothing of him in this moment, and nothing for her to miss. But she holds his gaze and he finds himself trapped.
Finds that he cannot move underneath the weight of her gravity.
He remains still as she moves forward, fluid in movement that belies the wood of her, and he aches with the need to fill the space. But he doesn’t. He stands apart, as straight as the soldier he had been bred to be, his mercurial eyes watching her so closely. His laugh is sudden, a bark of a thing that she surprises out of him, and for a fleeting moment, he feels like a boy again. The boy who had run alongside her in the woods when their parents had been at each other’s throats. The boy who had believed in happiness.
“And yet neither hold a candle to the stench of you.” He wrinkles his nose in a mockery, as though she does not smell sweet like ripe apples or blooming flowers. There is laughter in the creases of his mouth though, although it fades so quickly—washing clean as those his face cannot hold onto the shape of it.
He wants to though.
He does.
He reaches out for it and takes a stumbling step forward, the limp so apparent in the movement. He had healed, but even her mother had not been able to take that from him. He was forever marred by the brokenness of it. Nikolaus looked the soldier, but he never would be. He would never be able to run with clean, fluid lines. Would never be able to fight. He was a shattered thing still. A ruined thing.
The motion draws him up short, the embarrassment and shame flooding him.
“I don’t think I know how to stay anymore,” he confesses, but this time he can’t meet her gaze.
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )
