A Grizzled Face Is Not His Heart
His heart is tougher, punctured through as many times as it has been with nails of various degrees, of betrayal, of heartbreak, of the small pricks and jabs of a life intended to be lived for the best of others that ended up for their destruction.
His eyes of all his face show the trauma of the life he has lived, a life longer than the years lived in. They stare, incandescent with tears he never will shed, never has shed, locked on some future point, some distant something, so far away that they unfocus and refocus momentarily.
She didn't think the man responsible for the deaths of billions would have a haunted look about him. She didn't think she would hear the regret in the echoing chambers of his thoughts, in the stutter of his heart as he sees her face, once, then focuses beyond her into something so unknown even he doesn't have words for it.
This requires a new vocabulary, words no one has used in three hundred years, words no one will use again for hundreds more. She hopes ever, she hopes the words and all the things they mean decay into nothing as complete as the hollows of his mind.
