"I love you. I miss you. I cannot see your face."
♡
♡
She's never seen a town in shambles like this. She's never seen this rapid-fire succession of hellish imagery, captured like snapshots with every turn she makes. Looking down she's seeing the bodies of soldiers and civilians alike, trembling, broken flesh. She's drenched in blood, filthy and nauseous and her limbs heavy like lead from all the running.
So many people have died.
The first time she sees a man die in her arms, she's quiet. She isn't crying, nor is she angry. She isn't getting up, isn't speaking. She's just on her knees, staring at his still face, completely blank.
It's denial.
Her fingers are desperate around his, her hands hot and slick with blood. She whispers something to the body, but there's no room for fragility here.
In her recollections, the ghosts all blend together. The soldiers fallen at her feet, the girls grabbed by their hair, the boys seized by the backs of their necks. They'd all become one. Still, there had been something so unsettling about seeing a girl crying over a corpse. She knows what it's like now, to stare at her dead mother and not know how to move, frozen by denial and trapped by grief.
She's always said she hated pointless death, though there's nothing like experiencing it for the first time. It's painful to swallow grief and run, to ignore the pain and carry on solely so that she might survive.
You can't let it stop you. You have to keep running.
"Right now?" She whispers.
Yes.
This isn't happening. None of this is happening. The world is tilting, tilting, crumbling beneath her feet.
'Be still, my heart. Be still, be unafraid.'
She remembers it well, that mantra– that soft, sweet murmur. People like us, that voice echoes in her mind, his reflection pallid in dark glass, can't afford to linger on grief.
But why is it so wrong to grieve?
She takes a deep breath and squeezes her eyes shut. It isn't fair. A shudder, self-hating. Be still. Her lip trembles, but she looks away from the carnage, the lingering stench of death–
Be unafraid, she tells herself again.
Grief crawls out of her throat, unbidden. She tries to catch it in her mouth, but it worms its way through her lips. She's crying over a corpse again, knees stinging and bloody, and there's only anguish staining her like a thick paint.
Nothing is the same anymore, nor would it ever be again. Broken things can be mended but there will always be cracks, left more fragile than they were before. Eventually, there won't be enough pieces. The flames eat the wood of another home, bodies sprawled on the ground just beyond the smoke. Fire spreads throughout her throat, guilt slamming into her, desperation, the ice cold grip of fear. Her vision blurred with tears, she watches the blaze as it licks across what was once a sanctuary.
This city is burning.
And so is she.