all our ghosts 。°✩ flynn &. andal [95th, pre top-8]
Apr 5, 2024 16:04:54 GMT -5
Post by gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ. on Apr 5, 2024 16:04:54 GMT -5
ANDAL SEARLEY“How much of the hour do we have left?”
His dark-stained fingers squeeze Flynn’s in tandem with the gentle smile across his lips. “As long as you want, baby.”
As long as the grief stretches.As long as the pain allows.
Unleashed, the other goes on in a flurry. At the very first glance of the withered tree, flashes of what Andal had caught on screen during the eighty-seventh flicker back into his mind: rot and sick and radiation. He knows how effortlessly Flynn can get sick, flus that should pass with relative ease lingering on for days on end, but he has never connected that to the roots of the cause.
The roots run deeper though, and get more and more gnarled as they go from one face to the next, one memory to another. Andal sees only greying stone but Flynn, on the other hand, had met these faces, allied with them, killed some of them. He could sympathize, all in the same way the other had when he introduced his own game mates, and yet he could not follow along to the heart of that grief, to the desolate place where it all gather thickly and inseparably.
It was a river uncrossable, a history unexplainable.
And yet maybe they could share its burden.
He looks up at a girl’s face, her tresses of hair now made solid, eyes strangely kind despite their stony exterior. Nanette. They exchange a brief glance. Thank you for helping him live, he thinks to whatever part of her soul remains under the marble.
“She seems kind,” he offers Flynn with a smile.
Then he holds the other’s hand tighter as he senses his trepidation, his sudden pause. The girl they now face seems nearly bursting with ego even when rendered as a statue, her pose sultry and assured and ready for a photograph. Everyone wanted her. Katrina’s face emerges in his thoughts. They nearly resemble each other, Katrina and this Lorraine. A matching confidence, perhaps.
“Everyone wanted them, but you are the one who won in the end,” he adds to the tail end of the remark, words that strike a chord within his own chest. “We have to remind ourselves of that.”
Aurora, then Quinn. Both impossibly young, stolen from the world at the cusp of their childhood. Flynn, too. He couldn’t imagine going through what he did at eighteen, much less at – what? Thirteen? Fourteen? It broke his heart. But Andal was not here for picking up pieces of his own brokenness. Instead he took both of the other’s hands, palms out, and gave a warm round of kisses to each one.
“Yes,” he mutters into skin, almost devout.
“I wanna learn all the names of your ghosts.”