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To live the life he does is to live a life always holding death’s hand, to take it for a waltz and lace your fingers in between a cold hand and a frigid grin the shape of an ice-steel sword. To live life at all is to grow accustomed to the smell and sight of blood leaking, of eyes fading away, of curses hidden away behind lips silenced for the last time. It’s a mundane thing, perhaps, to silence the cries of his heart and to continue the path laid ahead of him. The tremble in his fingers, though, is something he doesn’t know he’ll ever grow accustomed to.
To live life is something almost like a shadow, always lagging two steps behind like a friend you just can’t shake off. The light, to him, is something horribly bright. Something always out of reach and ever blinding, yet his heart craves for it desperately ever still. But he knows, in his heart, that hands like his, stained eternally red by the blood they’d claimed, would never be allowed to grasp it. Even if he was, he wouldn’t deserve it.
This is what he thinks. This is what he knows.
Life changes in the only way it really can - the passage of time brings longer limbs, greater strength, and an ease that he can only find after months surrounded by death itself. He grows up with bars over his window, a knife under his pillow, scrubbing gore out of the floorboards instead of dust. It’s a boring life, as he recalls it through the lens of his spotted memory, turning back page by page. Somewhere, he wished for an end to that monochrome monotony, an end to the life of his where he could only kill and never save, never help.
His end comes in a man standing tall above him, ruby-red eyes filled with compassion and sadness. It comes with the very same man he was sent to kill wrapping a blanket around his shivering body and carrying him all the way back to a place called home in Rolent, a cozy village house in the middle of the boonies. It comes in a pair of sparkling red eyes and chestnut brown hair and a voice shrilly exclaiming why, in fact, her father had brought home some child instead of a toy for a present.
This is how Joshua Astray realizes that he had, in fact, known nothing about the world and of life, and every inch of boredom he had took a backseat to every thought with her in it - her bright-eyed smile, her unyielding stubbornness, her infuriating curiosity. He gazes upon the light for the first time and feels its warmth on his skin and immediately he is taken by it, taken with her. But just like Icarus, he longs for the warmth of the sun and his wax wings melt, and he is falling, falling, falling.
He has to remind himself, always. That this is far more than he has ever hoped for, could ever have deserved. The gentle smile on Estelle’s face when she promises that she would not pry about his past unless he himself had decided to speak about it is something that sits, guilt-ridden, heavy in the pit of his stomach.
Growing up in Ouroboros was one thing.
Growing up with Estelle Bright was certainly another.
He feels as if something inside him chips away every second he basks in her presence, breathes in her warmth. His voice always seems to wrap tight within his throat despite her comments on his glib tongue. She is something beautiful, this he is keenly aware of, but in the same vein that his traitorous mind whispers dark thoughts of his mistakes and failures and how unworthy he was to even exist near her, only allowed because even the brightest lights must cast the darkest shadows, he in that very same way wonders how the world must seem through her eyes. Was it something confused and unclear yet hopeful, as most children’s were? Something cynical and bitter, like his?
The understanding of her comes in pieces, in how she drags him out to share ice cream and attempts to make meals, as burnt as they so often were. This is the way he realizes that perhaps, the world was not so painful as he once thought it was, not so ugly as he believed. If something like her could exist in the world, it could not possibly be ugly. He sees the way the light reflects through her scarlet eyes and how her smiles were like the very sun itself, how every bit of her was truly something to be awed by and adored.
Ah, he thinks to himself, I understand it now.
He will bite back the tears hidden behind his eyes, he will let himself soften and his muscles relax.
He will try harder. For all of the things he has yet to make up for.
His heart, a cracked vessel, is slowly filling and this is a realization that terrifies him and fulfills him in a way nothing else can. Something once broken now being patched up and healed. There is a stinging longing inside him to hide himself away every time he understands this, that the old paint that was once him is peeling away. But just as much, he wants to protect this warmth in his hands, whatever may come.
Coming to the knowledge that he loves her is something that comes not in pieces, but in waves. Still, when he first realizes it, it feels like it’s a base truth of the world, something that always has and will continue to forever be. Something so cleanly obvious that he almost wants to slap himself in the face for not noticing it for so long. Or perhaps he had known all along - just, in the cruel way of children who had not known any better, not allowed himself to give a name to the feelings in his heart.
I love you. I have ever since the day I’ve met you, and I still love you, and I want to be with you forever. But I’m scared that if you knew everything about me, you’d hate me, and that’s the worst possible thing that I can imagine. Please, forgive me.
It’s easy to piece the words together in his mind, yet when he thinks about ever giving voice to these thoughts, he feels his mouth go dry and his throat clench. The truth still stands, bleeding and disgusting as it is; he is a monster without a soul, without a heart. The blood will never truly wash out of his hands and every time he scours his hands with soap and burning hot water his father places a knowing hand on his shoulder and shakes his head lightly.
Love is a funny thing and he wonders why he had ever taken it so lightly, will look at the figure of a little girl, the strongest person he’s ever known, and will detest every second he thought that throwing his heart away would have made him stronger at all. Estelle is sound asleep, brown hair spread across her pillowcase like wings, and he wonders what she is dreaming about. She had told him, before, that she had dreamed of adventures - traveling across open seas to different nations or through the boundless skies on airships.
Each day and every time he lays eyes on her, it becomes ever clearer he’d never deserved to be with her in the first place; it is like larceny, drinking in her existence. She is so real and so human and so far beyond his reach every time he even thinks about her his stomach twists from the guilt of the lies he’s had to tell, the darkness that comes up behind him as retribution for the deception he’s done.
But for her, he would do anything. Only for her.
He can only pray to Aidios and hope for forgiveness.
There is only grief in seeing Weissman. It’s a cold, cold thing inside him, making his breath shiver as Weissman snaps his fingers and returns all of his painful memories back to him. It’s the same thing that fills his stomach when Weissman smiles his damned smile and says to him:
“You are already a free man.”
With grief, comes denial. Denial turns to anger, anger turns to bargaining, bargaining to depression, and finally comes acceptance. He’s come to realize the pointlessness of asking the question why after everything’s over and done with. But still, reason cannot deny the passions, so he sits hunched over the bench where Estelle had promised to come back and he asks: why is this happening to me?
He realizes the answer, all too quickly and all too late; this was punishment for all of his sins, the lies he had told searching for a place to belong, the lies he had told to Estelle so that he would still remain in her sight, remain by her side. He stares at the ground until the colors of the marble patterning on the road seems to blur beneath him with tears.
It sickens him, these things. His weakness, his cowardice, and his pride. But still, he is grateful for these things in a twisted way. They give him strength to do what he knows he should have done a long time ago.
The mind is a traitorous creature; a bad servant with a worse master, and as he sits on the garden terrace of the royal palace, he finds himself searching through his mental index with all of the memories he had shut away. And alongside them in the same way grief comes with death, there are memories of Estelle alongside them.
She had been his heart, his home, his hope.
(His sun, as well.
But all things must pass, and day must give way to night, and thus he must leave her. The sun and moon cannot live together, after all.)
It’s only when she’s on the ground does he allow the words to come out. To say them into the air and tear his heart out for her to see only meant that he would finally be confirming the things that he felt, admitting them, and there was no thought more terrifying save for losing her completely. But he’d be doing both here, wouldn’t he? Letting his heart hang out in the open and departing from her side forever.
That is why he has to tell her now. The emotions he refused to accept, and the unending gratitude he felt to her for allowing him to grasp the light, even just for a little bit.
And when he says goodbye to her and disappears away into the night to face his fate, he mouths into the air to ears that would not hear:
I’m sorry.
He swallows, and it goes down flickering and burning.