HEARTS IN DARKNESS: EPILOGUE

[yourkeepers]

When dawn finally comes, you find them.

They're hanging in the grand hall, bound - almost cocooned - in inky black thread. The bodies of the victims, the ones without their hearts, are now miraculously whole. Cold and untouched, as if those terrible wounds had never been carved into their flesh.

They hang in various positions of rest, some limbs tangled and suspended, others simply hanging limply. Their eyes all all closed. The searchlight's body is still dull silver. The singer's hair dangles long and dark. The oracle's robes pristine.

It's like they've been left here for you, within your reach. The rest is in your hands.

Comments

[seerchlight]

He doesn't nod, exactly, but the look on his face seems to imply that Satandir is right. It isn't like what he remembered at all. And when that was his whole basis for his sense of well being...

Not that the idea of someone fucking around with his soul was much better.

"Why the fuck did he..." he trails off, frustrating and distress getting to him. He brings his hands up to clutch at the sides of his head. "The fuck did he do to me?"

[subtleserenity]

She weighs just how much of what they saw to tell him. She knows he probably means the ritual, anyway, not so much the slitting him open from gullet to gizzard that preceded it. "Used that dagger in the secret room - the one that makes you hear voices - to pull out whatever we got in here." Brimstone taps her chest. If there were some way to pull him close without scaring him, she might try. She's kneeling anyway, and scoots as close as she can, practically with her knees below where Lights hovers.

"Think he was tryin' to bring some kinda darkness out. Didn't get to say much about why he was doin' it." Her voice is a little proud as she says, "Shot him for you. Think I got him three or four bullets straight where his heart should be."

[seerchlight]

There's so much on his mind that it's taking a while to shuffle around into an order that makes sense again. Because along with this memory of a more recent murder, he's come back with something a bit more aged as well. His ears push downwards. He tries to face her, but is just a little off, like usual. His empty eyes are somehow still filled with despair.

"I didn't think he'd do that," he says, his voice tense and vulnerable with the realization. "I kept thinking I'd see it if it was coming. I knew. I...I always fucking knew but I didn't see him. I was wrong."

His voice finally breaks at the end, and he does his best to stifle the sob that threatens to bubble up within him. He doesn't want to do this, he doesn't want to fucking embarrass himself. But his emotions are just out of control and he doesn't know what to do.

[hourglassfigure]

Satandir frowns. She definitely doesn't remember there being nothing at all, when she was dead, even if it had been terrible and empty.

She swallows. (Or at least, she makes the external appearance of swallowing. There is, of course, nothing inside her transparent neck to swallow with except for a few falling grains of sand.) She really hopes Brimstone is right, and that he wasn't really dead. She so badly wanted, before, to be okay with death, she'd felt as if she should be, but it's harder than she thought it would be.

She keeps quiet for a while, glancing from Livingston to Brimstone and back again as they talk, not sure how to feel about any of this.

"It's over," she says, "You aren't dead any more," but she can't convince herself that that makes it okay, even though the first thing she ever knew when she woke up here was that it did.

[subtleserenity]

Brimstone can't help it. Lights is already practically in her lap, anyway. She reaches down her napkin belt and tears part of it off, raising the piece up Lights' face. She uses her free arm to wrap it around Light's waist in a semi-embrace.

This isn't her strong suit. She wants it to be very badly, but she doesn't know what else to say to him. And so, she says nothing and hopes some combination of drying his tears, the contact, and Satandir's words will do something.

[seerchlight]

Lights's ear flicks in Satandir's direction, trying to actually take in the sentiment for what it was. He wasn't dead. It shouldn't matter, right? What does anything matter if you make it out alive?

But then Brimstone holds him and he feels his ears reflexively pull pack, their expression at the mercy of his emotions. He hiccups the way one does when they are crying but are trying very hard not to, and as she begins to wipe away his tears he folds in against her, wrapping an arm around her waist for support.

He never really knew if this kind of thing would be okay between them, but right now it doesn't really seem to matter. For a moment, he just feels like a child.

[subtleserenity]

She holds him tighter when he reciprocates, eyes closing as she masters her own emotions. This is familiar, somehow, horribly so. It's only a vague memory, like most things are, but there had been someone else she'd held like this, someone else who had been hurt beyond just physical wounds, and whom she'd saved. She wants to put that bullet through the kitchen fire's head even more now.

The heat of her anger has cooled, though. It's still there, but with Lights alive and the fire probably worse off for being allowed to survive and suffer as he is, the dragon of rage screaming out for vengeance in her has taken to lying low. "We got you back, and no one's doin' that to you again," she says at length. "This place ain't right. Things don't get to workin' like they're meant to. Forge is gettin' rid of that dagger. Won't be able to cut on no one no more, and that fire ain't movin' for a spell, neither."