Let me explain you a thing -

-

The first time was a glimpse; nothing more. A fleeting moment of attention, an idle flicker of interaction that took hold of the very bones of reality and broke them apart at the marrow, leaving nothing but ghostlight and darkness and blood in its wake.

The second time, things looked back. Asked – screamed – begged – for answers that could not fit into the shapes of them. Flesh and mind and fear, tearing apart and roiling back again – unable – unwilling – unmade – and again and again until something tore itself away and plunged back – down – into the remnant waves.

The third time brought no questions. Only the one mind; held barely together by ancient, desperate desire, and every drop of him burning with it.  

I just want to live.

A god makes sense of what it sees, despite what it should be.

I see you.

I see you.

Agreed.

-

There is a very old power in hope. It is the flipside twin to despair, close as faces of a coin, and both of them terrible in their own way.  Despair crushes and enshrouds; muting and muzzling and murmuring its soft words of surrender. To give up; to give in; to accept a thousand deaths in as many different ways, because inevitability always wins out. Despair smothers, and it strangles, and yet may even offer a seductive, compliant comfort in its embrace.  

Hope, though?  Hope will burn in you; a brilliant, bloody pearl of wish and will that this does not have to be.  It is bright, and is blinding, and it is a shield and a northstar and it will not let you rest.  Hope is poison and panacea and everything between, its light sometimes barely a flicker and sometimes a sunburst’s heart. It is vicious, and it is divine, and it dances along outstretched hands and beneath broken fingernails clawing at the mud.

They are the daughters both of chance and change, and in each lies a seed of the other.

Simon is a man of hope.

And it has not finished with him yet.