#sofiabuchanan

He presses hard against his ribs once more, feeling the feeble thrum of his heart pulsing against his fingertips. This is what is missing, he decides; this is the phantom pain which persists in all its ghosts and memories, even after it has been gone for some time. 

Some time - how long has it been? How long has he stood at this window, watching the procession below? The people in the square weep; but Mason has never wept in his life. He wishes he could, now, for the loss of his most vital organ. He knows it to be gone, through the thrum of phantom beats keeps him awake at night. He knows it to be down there, stolen from him in the breath of a knife-thrust and a spill of viscera. Phantom limbs are meant to be something external, something seen from the outside, something to be pointed at when the wearer is not looking. 

Did he lose his arm in a war, perhaps? Does he ever miss the feeling of holding a woman’s hand? Can he still touch the same with the other? 

He’d have rather lost an arm, a leg, a useless bone from his fingers or toes. This is what phantom limbs are supposed to be; when someone leaves, they are not meant to take the heart with them. It is entirely unfair. Most need the heart to survive. Most.

          You have no heart, Buchanan.                     No, not anymore. She took it when she left. 

Indignation rings out with every pang of the phantom-heart, the tell-tale memory, against his ribs. She wasn’t meant to leave. And she wasn’t meant to take the shreds of his rot-heart along with her. He had no use for it, and yet he felt himself a hunched goblin, scrapping at garbage heaps for shiny things, valuable things, stashing them away in a belt-pouch to moon at later. A heart was a heavy burden to bear. At the bottom of the garbage heap. A rusted, dented thing. His heart was not a shiny thing to be taken and squirreled away, and yet she’d done it anyway.

                                Fucking thief. 

He remembers a time when she stole a sweet roll from his dinner. 

                                Don’t steal, Sofia. Don’t take what isn’t yours.

She pilfered it from his plate, from right beneath his nose. He’d watched her, let her munch away for but a moment, before reprimanding her, snatching it from lithe fingers and stuffed unceremoniously into his own mouth, half missing. He had laughed at her with his mouth full of dough, waggling his finger in the most brotherly way he could muster. He’d never been good at the brotherly displays. But for her, oh did he try. 

But there was no taking his phantom limb back; not now. It’d be passed along the processional, overlooked in favor of the queen in the box, passed off as decoration. No one would question the dead queen with a heart in her hands. Stranger things had happened. 

He presses his fingers against his ribs once more, seeking to rearrange, to reach between the third and fourth and squeeze the life from his phantom heart. How can it continue to betray him even when she has taken it with her? How can he still feel pain, feel drawn to the source of it, when she has gone where he cannot follow?

With a choke at the back of his throat, he presses his face, his palms, his chest, against the window. This is as close as he dare get to the processional below. He wants his heart back - but not unless she comes home to him with it. 

                    Fucking thief. 

Without her here, he doesn’t want it. There’s no need. And so he allows her to take it, and calls it a gift.