✧ a thing for @skybreakr
the fractured skyline of lumière - what was left of it - spilled out before them, towers bent like wilted stalks, as if the city had tried to bow before its end and snapped instead. he sat at the far edge of the camp, at a respectful distance from the others. he didn't speak unless necessary - some part of him feared his voice might betray just how far gone he was; coat was draped across his lap, the stump of his left arm was wrapped in cloth and bound tight to the shoulder, but the chroma still bled through in pulses, leaking like ink seeping through parchment; he looked larger now than he had before the fracture - broader, more imposing - and grief had carved new angles into him. the lowlight contoured his face strangely - once handsome, now carved by something more ruinous: he bore the mark of being repainted.
she approached - LUNE - as they all did eventually - not with malice, but with purpose sharpened into curiosity, someone used to questions that don't have answers - brilliant mind, quiet tread, notebook always half-open like a wound; always collecting data, mapping ghosts into sense. it was her way of grieving, maybe, or surviving. she moved with deliberation, her spine didn't bend under the weight of what she didn't know - that was rare. simon heard the way the campfire caught and held its breath as she neared; he met her eyes briefly across the uneven distance - hers seemed clear, calculating, still human; his held the weight of years collapsed into seconds, of time bent by grief, of a man who had stared too long into something vast and unkind and did not blink fast enough to forget it.
insects chittered, the ruins hummed with unnatural dissonance; the fire popped, a spray of embers scattering briefly in the air. his hand flexed once, as if expecting another to mirror it, forgetting the limb that should have answered was long gone.
"if you're looking for answers,"
he said at last, his voice sanded down, slurred slightly;
"you won't find them in me. I can only offer echoes - just fractures."
he felt it again, that sharp ache where something used to be, the place in him that should've mourned properly, that screamed during sleep but kept silent during waking hours - whatever had been human in him once, now felt like memory with teeth. there were things in him now that did not belong to the world above, things that spoke in colour and pain, that crawled beneath his skin like pigment gone wrong. simon let the wind move through him, through the places where the darkness had touched and never fully left. he let out a breath as he turned his face up slightly toward the broken sky - where the stars had long since slipped out of alignment, like marbles spilled from a child's hand.
