#broken-hearted

I am haunted by you.

My dreams are pain,

My memories burn,

My heart falls.

Every morning I lose you again,

And the agony is fresh and hot,

Like the sting of too much sun,

The fire of you left me as ash.

broken-hearted is more person than half- . hearted is

. What good is that . though?

. the poets know. But . I don’t.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Fate/Grand Order Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Romani Archaman/Merlin | Caster Characters: Merlin | Caster Additional Tags: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Emotional Baggage, Guilt, Canon Death, Post-Arc: Solomon (Fate/Grand Order) Summary:

Walking through Avalon always felt like walking through death itself.

Not only did Avalon feel like death, but it felt like guilt and remorse, too. Yes, of course. The garden and the tall, tall tower felt it.

Angstpril Day 3 - Heart-Broken

Read on Ao3!

Death didn’t exist in the way that most other things did, even abstract and intangible things. Most other things were a presence, a convex point or hill on the infinite plane that was existence, or concept. Rage was the presence of that burning, red static that felt like blood inside of veins. Guilt was the presence of blame, and blame was the presence of countless ‘what-if’s and ‘why didn’t you’s and ‘what could I have done differently to prevent this’s. Grief was the presence of guilt and blame and despair and rage and a thousand other things, a monstrous amalgamation of feelings that ate away at someone like an infection. Even loss was the presence of something - it was the presence of that insurmountable, crushing devastation, that all-consuming despair that haunted like a ghost.

But death? Death was an absence. A true, concave absence on the plane of existence or concept. It was the absence of whoever or whatever had died, an aching hole that for Anakin, was all-too familiar.

That didn’t mean it hurt any less.

Even if that death wasn’t real.

Especially if that death wasn’t real.

“Do I even know you at all?” Was the thought that kept circling Anakin’s mind whenever he thought of his former master. 

He thought he had known everything there was to know about Obi-Wan Kenobi. He’d known that his favorite tea was that spiced one from Mandalore, that he liked to meditate right after he woke up and right before he went to bed, that he preferred the old-style flimsy books over datapads whenever possible, and that his favorite genres were romance and mystery, and that his favorite scented candle was ‘forest campfire’. Anakin knew that Obi-Wan didn’t much care for physical contact, but that he showed his affection through food despite his notable lack of cooking skills, and that he was scared of not living up to Qui-Gon’s expectations even after more than a decade since the man’s death, and that he still had feelings for that Mandalorian duchess even though he tried very hard to pretend not to, and that he had a fear of tookas after being partially mauled by one in his youth. Anakin knew that Obi-Wan liked to take hour-long hot showers, a fact that had horrified a young and water-worshipping Anakin, and that Obi-Wan hated it when Anakin flew because he almost always got airsick, and that Obi-Wan’s ‘aesthetic’ was most definitely ‘sad beige mom’, no matter what he said. Anakin knew his hopes, his fears, his likes and dislikes, his strengths and weaknesses, his various quirks and oddities, everything. 

Or, at least, he thought he did, because the Obi-Wan he thought he knew would never do something like this. The Obi-Wan Anakin knew strived to complete the mission, sure, and sometimes he got a little blindsided by whatever goal he was seeking to achieve, and sometimes that led to someone (mostly Anakin, sometimes Obi-Wan, often the both of them) getting hurt in some manner - and yeah, maybe the Obi-Wan Anakin knew could come off as a little cold, or dare he say cruel, in his strive to do what he thought was best. 

But this? This was something else entirely, and it put everything Anakin thought he knew about the man into question. 

Put everything Anakin thought he knew about the Order as a whole into question.

Obi-Wan’s supposed death had… it had broken something inside of Anakin, something that was never meant to twist the way it had. He couldn’t stop seeing it, when he closed his eyes: the body, lying there, a limp and lifeless puppet sprawled across the ground, cradled gently by Ahsoka - Ahsoka, so young and vulnerable to the tragedies of the world, exposed to such a trauma as holding her grandmaster’s rapidly cooling corpse, and the subsequent nightmares that ensued. He couldn’t stop remembering the way the world had sharpened to focus on every detail, every component of the environment suddenly screaming at him, even the smallest things overtaken by vivid clarity - the way the grimy walls of the adjacent buildings were dappled with rust and washed-away graffiti, how an oily sheen on the ground had reflected and refracted the light in a disgusting rainbow of color, how the unusually cool air had felt as it grazed against his skin. 

The red of Obi-Wan’s hair appearing crimson in the dim light. The rustle of the wind against his robes giving the false impression of movement, of breathing, of life. The stench of burnt cloth and blaster fire. The choked sound he made when he saw his master lying there, oh-so-reminiscent of how his mother had laid sprawled across the sand a year before, an aching and fetid wound that still had not healed.

And a part of him hated Obi-Wan for that, for everything he and Ahsoka had went through, for the nightmares that lingered and the traumas that plagued them, the way that they shuddered at the sound of someone falling down, of flesh hitting the ground - he hated him for that. The sleepless nights, that sinking and endless pit of despair, that feeling as though nothing would ever be alright again, followed up by the sucker punch that was finding out that it had all been a lie to weaponize his greatest weaknesses and insecurities in some sort of convoluted scheme - even if he had wanted to properly grieve, that chance had been robbed from him, all closure stolen away, leaving only the directionless grief that now seemed irrational. 

Obi-Wan wasn’t really dead… so why was he still grieving?

Rage intermingled in with his despair, yet Anakin still struggled to fight off the deep depression he had fallen into. 

The progress he had made since his mother’s death wasn’t… spectacular, but he had been making progress. And yet, at the sight of that body lying there, a pale and vulgar impersonation of someone Anakin loved dearly, he had felt every ounce of progress he had made slip away, setting him all the way back to square one. 

Except now, the grief was doubled, and with it all the guilt and sorrow and rage and awful, awful loneliness. Anakin grieved, silently and painfully, as he always had, but with twice the intensity as he had before, some horrid thing inside of him burning hotly with the raging feelings he felt. That burning thing, like the core of a star, never failed to crawl up through his veins and arteries at night, boiling his blood, when he lay awake and couldn’t stop remembering. It heated the backs of his eyes, spilling molten tears down his face, sparks and smoke stinging his eyelids. It smoldered in his chest, smothered his throat with broiling emotion, choked him of sound. He wanted to scream, to curse, to yell, to shout; he wanted to whisper quietly in the stillness just to see if he could shatter it, he wanted to speak in low voices with the figures from his memories of before this great betrayal. He made no noise, the fire overtaking his vocal chords. 

Anakin felt alone, isolated - everyone else seemed to simply forgive and forget. Was it really that easy for them? Did they simply let go of their feelings, or are they secretly like Anakin, hiding them away deep inside to release in the dead of night? Was Anakin really the only one still feeling what he felt, still reeling from the vicious emotional rollercoaster ride he had been subjected to against his will? Was he the only one still struggling to forgive Obi-Wan and the Council and the Force as a whole for the cruel trick they had played? Was he the only one with a warring dichotomy of conflicting hate and love? 

Was he truly the only one to shoulder this heartbreak?

@chaos-company   @whumpril

Chapters: 1/1  Words: 500 Fandom: The Witcher (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Cahir Mawr Dyffryn aep Ceallach & Ceallach aep Gruffyd Characters: Ceallach aep Gruffyd Additional Tags: whumpster-dumpster's Whumpril 2024, chaos-company's Angstpril 2024, Self-Doubt, Broken-hearted

Summary: Ceallach aep Gruffyd's loses everything, and, worst of all, his youngest son. Companion piece to "One Day".