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A familiar ache blazed down the canyon-deep crevices of Aramis' fractured heart. He'd felt it so many times in so many ways that he thought, Surely, I should be used to it by now...
However, that was never the case.
Although the times and situations mutated and changed, shifting and squirming in and out of existence like maggots in blood, the reason was always the same. A person he'd devoted all of his heart to had ultimately shattered it beyond repair. Granted, he always made incredibly valliant efforts to repair it. The last time, it took him half a year until he found most of the pieces of his heart and sealed them together with blind faith. Now, however, the incomplete thing, collapsing under the weight of proken promises and bold-faced lies, creaked and groaned dangerously beneath its overburdened load. Not only was his heart breaking again... it was being crushed into a fine powder, dust.
And once that dust caught in the wind, no amount of searching could bring it back. And if, by some miracle, he was able to catch that dust again, to glue it back together with the feeble, tacky and undependable bindings of more empty promises, it would never even remotely resemble anything of a heart again.
As he lay in the grass, the cool breeze licking at his skin, the stars overhead twinkled with oblivious mirth. Aramis put a hand to his chest, grimacing in pain. He could feel his heart breaking... he could actually feel the tight, sinking feeling in his chest, just under the sternum, the soft, beating muscle being yanked apart by an unseen (yet undoubtedly real) force. He turned onto his side, drawing his knees up to his chest and hugging himself tightly. Too many things were going on right now, too many things that were pushing him over the edge: a week of sleepless nights, a week of backbreaking 16-hour work days of manual labor; his own usual torrid headaches now played host to a series of pains in the shoulder, the neck, the gut... and her birthday had just passed. He was a wreck. A total wreck. He snapped at anyone and anything that dared to make eye contact with him and didn't hesitate in turning to the bottle for comfort.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to every one and no one. "I'm sorry... I'm losing it."
At that moment, a name flashed through his mind: Punishment. It was an unusual name, sure. Most likely, it was a psuedonym, but considering what some parents name their children, one couldn't be too sure. But Punishment, oh, he was someone Aramis couldn't forget even if he tried. And Deus knows he tried... Punishment was a drug. A drug that burrowed deep into his veins, seeping through every artery and into the very center of his cells, being forever duplicated in an exact manner when they split and multiplied. And now, after the things he'd said, he was sure Punishment had withdrawn his friendship from Aramis' care. Perhaps he meant what he said; perhaps he didn't. He certainly wasn't in the right state of mind when he said them, though. He was teetering between sanity and insanity, the sleep deprivation, raw agony and constant nausea working their way into the very marrow of his bones.
And now, as is his greatest fear... he's alone.
Alone.
Alone.
Shielding his head from a blow that would never come, Aramis slowed his breathing and tried his best to fall asleep. But sleep was a precious commodity these days...
...And unfortunately, he still couldn't afford it.
 Bleeding Apocalypse · Fri Dec 23, 2005 @ 09:41pm · 2 Comments |
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