⋆ ━ be brave.
( &&* @firefeathered is awakened in the dead of night ! )
Blood splashes across his face, stains his clothes, drips onto the feathers decorating his hair from the body it’s leaking from overheard. A SOB slips from his lips at the sight of the man who’d been his father mere minutes ago. Now he’s little more than corpse and the culprit is stalking towards them, intent to kill evident in their eyes and a familiar mantra echoing in his head like the invocation of a spell.
“You have to be brave.”
Be brave, be brave be bra—
Upon waking, he JUMPS, the whole bed rocking as he nearly sends himself tumbling off of it, thanks to the image of his long dead father. For a brief second, he mistook the sweat covering his skin with the blood that had been on it before.
When he hears a voice, a quiet and tired mumbling from next to him, he startles, head jerking to look at the source.
“E-Eli...”
It takes him a second to realize how he must look. Terrified, unstable... It’s ways he can’t look, not when he has to PROTECT Elijah. He has to be brave, show no weakness, be a pillar of support to the phoenix that his father had died for.
Clifford had vowed to do the same, after all.
He chokes those emotions down, focuses the same mantra from before, the very same one that his father had drilled into his head in the short time anyone could’ve called them a family.
You have to be brave.
“Sorry, did I wake you?” His tone is far too flat and his eyes void of emotion. Ideally, he would smile and maybe make a sarcastic remark or a joke, but the image was too fresh in his mind for smiles or laughter. “I was dreaming I was being chased by a pack of wild DOGS.”
Even he knew that that sounded like little more than an excuse.
