Toujours || Drabble
Place: Berlin, Germany Mentioned: Benjamin Kraft, Amando Ricci, Damien LeBlanc, Avery Ford, Amara Leon-Ford, Ari Leon-Ford, Adira Leon-Ford cc: @alicemorganwrites, @levi-writes
Near-silent tread and a ghostly echo sank into the unilluminated asphalt of a nearly unfamiliar German street. Meticulously calculated steps carefully evading the sights of anyone assumed to be near, though the constant, shrill ringing only now began to dissipate from the confines of an occupied mind betraying a misstep. Fatal miscalculation.
Right hand pressed against the partially untucked grey fabric lilting over hips, Chanel obsidian, hand-pressed faux leather—a reminder of a life once lived—groping the subtle curve of lithe limbs. Even now, the lioness never arrived underdressed. Brief stint in normality a simple flicker in the wind, no trace to be found in her gait or gaze. Abandonment, it had been termed. Necessity rang in the key of veritas to the blonde reaper—bringer of death. Solemnity never rearing its head. Such was fate. A lioness alone.
Gentle chill of 3AM, a stark reminder of the night’s ilk, seeped through a curtain of pale blonde. Desolation. The putrid illumination of faltering lamps in the distance calling kin home. Children of Nyx—cursed to roam under the cover of chaos’ mother. Nothing beautiful stepped foot from shadow at such an hour. Only shards of Eris herself and non-dominant fingers found home in the crook of steel, trajectory bringing cover and isolation into view.
Several moments hung, reciting a slow kaddish, trudging past to reveal a familiar apparition. Cerulean illuminating even the disconsolate organ encased in bone beneath a single breath. Dark tendrils dissipated into the ether, irises never leaving the vision. Locks tousled in the breeze without sign of fading into nothing. Not routine. Hazel caught in azure, frozen in time. A welcome into netherworld, then. To waltz with Hades; a fitting end. Right hand dropped from its protective perch, acquiescing. Sanguine nectar devouring fabric with ferocious immediacy.
Fates finally poised to sever thread.
This wasn’t how she thought it would go—dark and filled with boundless regret. Regret for being alive. For surviving. How she wished she had been wrong, though the ache in her bones told her decades earlier she was a walking sepulcher: the ghost of someone else. She was barely out of her teens when it happened—when she died, face planted against the street, its uneven surface tearing into her skin, vision blurring and obscured by the blood of a man she knew well. One that had taken care of her. A man she knew now wasn’t all he’d seemed.
She remembered the face of the boy who had pried her lids open to watch—a boy not much older than she, but far more jaded. She never forgot his face. His lifeless eyes. How could she? She’d inherited them when she killed him a decade later.
She remembered waking from her nightmare after a week in the care of strangers when a soon-to-be leader stole her from death. His golden hair a single fleeting moment of hope in endless darkness. And she remembered Ben.
Always Ben.
Barely a year older than her—they had both been so young and tossed so carelessly into the arms of what looked like redemption, or a paltry attempt to find it. His crystalline blue eyes caught sight of her when they dragged her in, but she couldn’t remember it. Could hardly remember the first time they spoke—likely when she ripped needles from veins and tried to run. She remembered stumbling and arms reaching out to catch her. He’d always been protective. She remembered his brown hair and those blue eyes.
Those blue, blue eyes.
How his lips curled when he said her name like they were the most amusing two syllables one could utter.
Astrid.
She remembered how he’d let her curl into herself beside him to sleep; the countless half-silent meals they shared; the odd hour texts and endless insults at which only they laughed. She remembered the last time she heard from him—it played on an endless loop in her head:
if being ordered into the city again to find daniel and the others gets me killed, i want you to find that asswipe who did it and do what you can do best. kick ass and stay safe, dumbass! love you.
She remembered dying all over again and how she wished the gunshot to the stomach had been lethal. Remembered someone telling her he’d been found. She couldn’t remember who. She couldn’t remember anything beyond hovering for hours over those blue, blue eyes that someone had so carefully closed. They were supposed to die together. Astrid wasn’t supposed to outlive him—she was supposed to be the ghost, dammit, why wasn’t she a ghost?
Astrid remembered crying, thought she might be crying now too.
Her back pressed against the wall of an overpass and Astrid felt the world slow. She’d been here before—three times to be exact—but there was no one to steal her away as blood poured from a litany of open wounds, now. This was what she deserved, wasn’t it? What she’d asked for.
Astrid remembered Avery and how his relentlessness tore her further from death—blue eyes a paltry replacement for all she’d lost. She remembered loving him once. Remembered waking from a final coma, Damien’s blood still under her fingernails, and how everyone smiled at the miracle and no one noticed she wasn’t alive. Not really. She thought of Avery’s blue eyes in Rome and the children; of Amara and how this would be the most difficult transition she could ask of her eldest—how she would likely know within the hour; of Ari, her perfect boy, and how she’d loved him so dearly, more than she’d ever thought possible; of Adira and how much like Ben she was. How much of him reflected in her brown eyes and how Astrid hoped Adi would be half as gentle. Benjamin would have taken to being an uncle well and Astrid felt her throat seize as she spit blood on the concrete.
Ben.
They’d told her Ben—her Ben—had died quickly, but Astrid knew better. Her life had been dedicated to the unravelling of humans, peeling back their skin to peek underneath. He’d suffered first, wondered, agonized, and only then did someone give him reprieve. Astrid deserved to suffer and welcomed the life draining into her lungs. How horrid it was to drown.
One pained cough carried chest to asphalt, blood pooling at her lips. Familiar.
The hallucinations had gotten worse over the ten years she’d survived—apparitions more corporal than humans wandering under putrid flickering street lamps—and she saw them: lifeless eyes staring, staring, staring. Calling her to where they were. She wouldn’t follow. She would wait for him.
Astrid gagged, gargling remnants of lost breath and for a moment she was afraid.
Vision went white as life vanished from her exsanguinated veins and all that remained was a final fleeting thought of blue eyes.
Those blue, blue eyes.















