Oh How You Have Lost Your Way [Clusterfuck]

[googlefont="Playfair Display:400"]basil anatola

It’s cold for the rest of the night.

Basil tucks into himself, shuddering and spasming almost violently in his sleep. He drifts in and out of consciousness, like a ship refusing to be sunk. When the ocean swallows him, though, it swallows him whole. He’s on his third round of falling asleep by the time Roland appears in his dreams.

“What are you doing?,” he asks him, like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

The first thing Basil notices is how clean he looks. There’s a soft, healthy glow radiating off his skin. Not even a single, purple blemish colored onto his neck. He looks whole. Alive. But, there’s still no relief that washes over Basil; instead, it’s the panic of knowing that this is something that won’t last.

The second thing Basil notices is his own shame radiating within him. It’s an ugly thing that he can’t ignore with the way Roland stares at him. I’m sorry, he wants to say, but you don’t know how it feels here. You took the easy way out. I wish I could do the same.

The third thing Basil notices is how this is probably not the right thing to say.

“What are you doing?,” Ro asks again, and Basil has known him long enough to tell when he’s trying to not show that he’s angry. But, he is. And, just like that, Roland is no longer a part of a dream - he’s the whole nightmare. His eyes grow hollow, and the skin on his cheeks sink into the caverns of his skull. All of his flesh grows taut and dried up, so that you can see the way his skeleton presses against it. He’s dead, again, and he looks like everything Basil dreads to be. Roland’s voice is hardly there when he says, “You can do better than that, can’t you?”

For the fourth time that night, Basil wakes up.



He doesn’t go back to sleep. At dawn, he finds himself staring at Danny, instead - something he’s not allowed to do. But, she’s pretty, and Ezero’s asleep, and so is she, and no one knows that he’s even looking except for him and the rest of the world watching. He doesn’t think about them, though. Instead, his eyes trace over her tired features - softened from the morning sunlight and sleep - and his hands itch for a paint brush and a blank canvas so that he could paint them.

Then, he feels a scratch where his left foot should be and he’s suddenly itching for a whole other thing.

It’s Danny that supports him as they trudge out of the mangroves and into some flooded fields. She keeps him leveled and balanced and from falling over onto his axe. He’s grateful for that, but every time he stumbles, she turns to meet his gaze and murmurs some string of sweet nothings that don’t really comfort him in the way she hopes it does. “Take your time,” she tells him, as if time weren’t a foreign concept in this arena. As if she didn’t know that, here, you don’t want to look at the clock - you’re trying to beat it.

But, Time is mankind’s oldest enemy, and he wears the same face as Roland’s corpse and every other corpse that has died before him. It’s a familiar face. And, as soon as the grasses are low enough to see through to the other side, Basil can see it.

Tick tock, Basil, he taunts as Basil drops to the ground as soon as Danny lets go of him to swipe her dagger into a girl’s cheek. The dirt that slams into his face reminds him of his roots - reminds him that those born into the dirt die in the dirt and are buried beneath the dirt. Basil Anatola is fucking tired of dirt. Instead, his fingers fumble sloppily over each other as they reach into the rucksack he carries. With shaking hands, he manages to drape tar over the blade of his axe and light it on fire.

Tick - He forces himself to get up. - tock - It hurts. - tick - He lurches forward. - tock - He doesn’t even bother to see who it is. - tick -

Maybe he doesn’t want to see.

Tock.

[presto]

K i t e
D 4
1 8
"you take your time
y o u n g   l i o n"

[/presto]