Work Text:
His ill-gotten mansion is dark and cold, and that is the way he prefers it.
It seems a fitting place for him, at that—the broken and ruined remnants of someone else's life slowly crumbling around him in bits and pieces, saturated with the apathy and entropy of death and decay.
The neighbors do not care for him, nor does he for them. They keep their distance and he keeps his, not only from them, but from himself, though not always by choice.
The memories he has now are tainted ones; Any others he might have had seem lost to the sands of time, somewhere far beyond his reach.
On occasion, one taunts him, dancing just close enough to feel, tickling at the corners of his mind like the tip of a feather, a slow trickle flowing one droplet at a time, sharp little pinpricks of light in the darkness—something, but not enough. There is a flash or two of epiphany at most, and then, once more, emptiness.
He swings between hatred and self-pity, and then anger and resentment at both. There is happiness in the blissful calm that comes between, weaving in and out of his consciousness during the moments when he is able to let go. Loneliness creeps up on him eventually, sliding through his thoughts like a slow moving fog, enfolding his heart and his mind in a deceptively gentle embrace.
He regrets everything and nothing, suspended in some strange, dissonant limbo between sorrow and silence, and his spirit aches even when his heart feels like stone.
Sometimes, he finds peace at the bottom of a bottle, taking comfort in the fog as it blurs and softens everything it touches, even pain, but it is fleeting, and not truly real, and the anger returns tenfold when disappointment settles back down upon him, cold and heavy—like chains.
Seductive whispers from the past taunt him with hows and whys, but he turns from them in disgust because it does not matter—questions hold no meaning for him. There is only what is, and what is not, and what never will be again.
He has cut the cancer of magic from his life—extracted his hot, red revenge from the chambers of Danarius' still-beating heart—but he cannot cut it from himself, and the hypocrisy of his own existence is the most bitter pill to swallow.