#knolia

His hands won’t stop trembling.

He’s always had steady hands. ‘Steady hands lead the people’ is what his father would say to him when he was small. He hasn’t been small in quite some time, and now, his hands won’t stop shaking.

Distantly, everything is distant now, he can hear the crowd's mix of jeers and confusion. He’s supposed to be dead. The people want him dead. He wants him dead.

His hands won’t stop trembling.

Slowly, always slowly, the procession inches forward towards the crowd. He can hear their words now. They’re still loud and jumbled, but he can hear them.

“It’s the traitor Knox!” One calls out in disbelief. He can’t help but feel some disbelief himself, the words send his already unsteady feet tripping. A strong hand wraps around his arm before he can truly fall.

His hands won’t stop trembling.

He had almost forgotten his own name. He tries to feel it out in his mouth, to make his tongue curl around the consonants. All that trembles out is the same litany that’s reverberating in his skull, echoing back and forth.

“Freedom is a lie, law is the truth, freedom is a-”

The hand around his arm tightens and jerks him slightly. He doesn’t think they truly heard the mumbles, but they know when his mouth moves only one thing comes out.

His mouth snaps shut. The hold doesn’t loosen. The procession hasn’t stopped. The jeers haven’t stopped.

His hands won’t stop trembling.

He tries to take a moment, to steady them or steady his walking or steady anything. But then he blinks and he’s already on stage, the moment has already slipped his grasp.

If he’s on stage, that means he must speak, he must address the people. He lifts his lips, just as his father taught him, to something that was once maybe a smile. He doesn’t think it quite works, his lips are too chapped, his skin stretched too thin and his eyes remain flat.

It used to be a reassuring look to those under him, now those closest recoil. His hair used to be soft, now it is limp against his sweating forehead. His teeth were picture perfect, and now they were starting to yellow. His eyes were once described as charming, now they look like they belong to a dead man. In a manner of speaking he did.

His hand won’t stop trembling.

The Director of Economics stops talking, and gestures for him to come forward. And she turns to him. And just for a moment, his hands still.

She’s red, red, red, red and his vision is red. And he can see her, and she’s beautiful and happy and laughing at something he said but they’re laughing together. And just for a moment, for one single, aching moment, he’s not this trembling shell of what the good doctor left him. Knox is himself again, and Tilia is right there in front of him and close enough to touch.

And then he can see her eyes. And oh, his Tilia never looked at him like that. The director’s eyes are full of such pain and anger and hatred towards him, yet her mouth is a cocky smirk and she’s so much like his Tilia and so wrong and just for a moment longer, in the echo of his heartbeat he thinks…

She’s dead and gone and it’s all their fault.

His hands shake with the magnitude of his rage. His knuckles are still bruised and his throat is still purple and side still aches and for once it serves to focus him like an arrow.

And then his rage slips from him too, leaving only behind a desolate fear of the room and the good doctor and it’s all gone. He is left an aching weeping wound that will never heal. His Tilia is gone and it’s all his fault.

He knows now what he must do, who he must sacrifice to uphold the law. The pirates are nothing in the wake of the doctor. Are nothing in the wake of the empire.

By the time he can slip off the stage, his feet are shambling like a lamb, lungs pumping like a broken well and eyes twitching this way and that, intense light all too much after such a long time underground.

The Director gives him a look, it is somewhere between contempt and content.

His hands won’t stop trembling.