[private] feels like a lifetime, este

[Selaphiel]

selaphiel

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes

He is young, Selaphiel.
But he is tired.
So dreadfully, inescapably tired.

Because the smell of death is trapped so bitterly in his sinuses, because the stench of it had chased him away from her for so long. Because he could not hold his breath long enough to curl himself against her side, to lend her some of his warmth, to let her heartbeat orient itself around his. 

He is young, Selaphiel.
But he is sorry.

Because he had not been stronger. Even now, he is not strong. Because the light is too bright and the eyes are weak and he sticks to the shadows where he belongs. Because he is a light thing but he believes he must have been made for the dark. A thing made for death. This must be why he can smell it, why it is trapped in the sinuses. Why he cannot escape it, even with the sun hanging fat and proud overhead. 

He has scarcely been able to breathe since the day in the hills when Mazikeen had told him about the twins, about their father. Still, his eyes burn with the tears that had sprung up there. How strange it had been for the truth of it to crash down around him so suddenly. Why hadn’t he been able to smell it on her earlier? 

And now he wanders, adrift. Sick with shame.
Aimless.

He looks for her, for Este. For refuge.
Though he is haunted still by the death he smelled on her, too. Haunted by his inability to stay. Haunted by his weakness. Haunted by this shame, too. 

(Has she forgiven him? Should she?)

When he finds her, he does not speak. He simply lies down near her. He makes himself small, this angel carved from ice. He lies down his weary head and he turns those glacial blue eyes up to the sky. The crevasses carved in his skin glow that same glacial blue. He is a thing made of so much cold. How gently the halo rests on the ground when he exhales. 

He blinks once, slow. He does not want to open his eyes again.
But he must.

“Do you think suffering is eternal, Este?” he asks, so quiet.
It is not self-pity. It is not pity at all, but curiosity. 
Will they always suffer?

I just bite my tongue a bit harder

@[Este]