Dray

Little drabbles for today!

Lighthouse

Community: sweetandshort
Wordcount: 100

Wherin she stands at the height and breadth of a rocky outcropping, she holds the candle high, sheltered in one hand, awaiting her lover and her killer. She remembers every detail of every ending, but still she doesn't and won't and can't shirk her task, because were she to, were he to lose his way, he would lose himself forever. And loathe though she is, of him, of her letting him be the end of her, she loves him so much that she would sacrifice it all in a moment rather than bear the torment of his losing his way.

Dread

Community: comment_fic
Wordcount: 1287


Dread, dread, dread. James is growing so tired of dread that he isn't sure if he can even feel it anymore. Like he has lost the sense of smell in such overwhelming rot, the sense of dread he feels is constantly pushed to its limit, and snapped.

But this place still finds ways to push him. It's a grinding, endless thing. Just when he thinks he's numb to it, the world gives him numbness, space, oppressive loneliness. And when he's just about ready to end of the muffled reverberations of isolation, dread blossoms one more time.

But it's a cycle, he can just about see it now. This place is strange, it doesn't make sense. But nothing has made sense to him for a long time. Is he going crazy? Wait, that's not the right question. The right question is probably something more along the lines of has he gone crazy, and if so, how long ago did it happen?

It happened when he lost his Mary. Obviously. Obviously he couldn't go on without her. This is hell. This is his hell.

He clutches a blank sheet of paper between two stained hands, cracked and soiled thumbnails framing a missive he knows he saw there hours... maybe days ago. The writing isn't there now. Even that, the drive to find his Mary, his late, lost Mary, has lost its mooring, and he floats in a space of dread so thick that it's physically binding.

"Why did you call me here?" he mutters. His voice is hoarse from noxious fumes and his own anguish. He is talking to himself, but the click-scrape-clack tap of stilted heels on crumbling concrete makes a liar of his senses.

He doesn't flinch when Maria settles into a squat next to him, her arms wrapped around her knees, her posture just barely demure as she just barely keeps from leaning on his shoulder. "James," she says, tired in her own way. "It wasn't like that. It's the other way around, honey."

He is beyond questioning how Maria comes to find him, anymore. He has seen the light go out of her eyes more times than he can count. She isn't his Mary, and he can't make any more space in his heart for lost causes. He just... can't.

He folds the piece of paper and aggressively shoves it into his coat, bracing himself against her words as he stares at the flickering half-globe of tepid light illuminating the wainscotting across the hall from him. A board is missing. An absolutely enormous cockroach is hiding behind one of the missing board's loosened neighbours, but only one. He knows by now that there's never only one, but he is so exhausted by an overload of dread that he cannot be bothered to remember that for this one, visible, disgusting speck of filth, there are millions of others. There are probably a couple hundred chewing their way behind the boards he's leaned his back on.

Suddenly, focusing on Maria doesn't seem so awful. "I didn't call you here." He's resentful, but even he can here how his voice feels sullen, defeated. "You died. You shouldn't be here."

Maria's brow draws together and for a second she isn't throwing every iota of her being into being a calm, soothing presence. He can feel a cold radiating from her, and he turns to look just as she masks her anger. She chuckles, looking away, tucking pink-tinged hair behind one ear. "That's a funny joke, James." She still sounds so, so tired.

Dread blossoms again in him and he feels the urge to react. To push her aside, to scrabble to his feet and run away. The empty fold of paper against his breast is burning a hole in his pocket. I have to find Mary is etched into the pulsing red behind his lids whenever he closes his eyes too long, and knowing how lost he is now, he doesn't know how to tell her that he isn't sure that Mary's anywhere to be found. How could he admit that he is feeling doubt?

She tilts her head to one side and reaches a hand to his shoulder, warm and reassuring, everything that he could possibly want her to be. He's never going to want her. She is never going to be enough for him. She is Mary's pale shadow, she is a frivolous fantasy, and she knows it. She can see that James doesn't understand, but she can see he can sense it. He doesn't want her here... and maybe he never will. If she could, she'd find some way never to need him, either. But right now, she can't think her way to it. So she squeezes his shoulder again. "Get up, James."

He doesn't look at her. His sit is one of utter dejection. Malady, in the form of torporous inaction. She thinks he looks a little like a puppet with all of his strings cut, and she turns a smirk of disgust and distress into a little moue of empathy. "James, you still have something to do, don't you?"

He startles, and he turns to look at her briefly, then away again. "I have to..." he swallows. He's never come this close to the truth of it before. He's also never come this close to losing. At a gentle prompt, a pressing of laquered lips into an, 'mm-hmm?' from Maria, he clears his throat. "I have to find her. I... I'm sorry."

"Darling, I know," Maria says. She unfolds from her sit, languid in action but at a cost she is never going to be able to allow him to see. She offers a hand. "And when you're done that, you come to me, won't you? James?" She gently waves her hand in front of his face until he groans and accepts her help, and she savours the rough skin of his palm enfolded around her hand as he brings himself to bear, trying her hardest not to let that show, either. God, she wants him to stop this, to stop all of this. But she knows what happens when he does.

And she knows her roll in distracting him. She feels it pulse behind her ribs, that aching love balanced on a knife's edge. If she tries too hard, she pushes him away. If she allows him to make his own mistakes, he can so easily give in to depression. And if she does just right, if she pulls him out of his shell and into her orbit, that is the worst fate by far. Still, she aches. She's tired of playing a roll. She doesn't take offence when he ignores her, when he shakes his head to clear the cobwebs. He turns to her and gives her a befuddled look, just as much hurt and broken as she feels. "Go on," she says, shooing him, smiling as unthreateningly as she can. "It's not long, now."

She wishes he'd thank her, before he gives a gruff little grunt of acceptance, and he slouches away. But he doesn't, and he won't, ever. If he did, they'd both be worse than dead, and though she knows she has such little recourse in what she can or cannot do, here, it brings her some sense of relief to know that she might help him break this cycle. When he does, she won't matter anymore. God, that will be such a relief. She rarely allows herself hope, but as the hall returns to perfect darkness, as the creep and slither of cockroaches resume their relentless disintegration of construct to nature, she wipes her cheek and nods to herself. She wants so badly not to want to matter.