A/N: This little thing was inspired by a prompt. See if you can guess the song which inspired it!
Rain skims the outer edge of the unsheltered pavement, darkening the tarmac to a glistening indigo gray. It is thin, fleet drizzle – more mist than liquid, shimmering against every surface. The moon, wrapped in a dull mask of cloud, glows dimly, like an illicit torch under the duvet, batteries dying. (England still takes a childish pleasure in reading under the covers, enveloped in darkness; he does not, after all, possess eyes easily ruined.) Stars are elusive, as always – obscured by the insistent street lamp lights even when the sky is clear. This was not always so, even in London; in another age, he could name every single constellation, blazing clear as countless headlights on a darkened road – but now, appropriately, they hide themselves in the haze.
They once had benevolence, gave him guidance: stars are your only street map to a displaced sailor on the open seas. Now the pompous little esoterics have abandoned him, like the glow worms to Marvell's pitiable mower.
No! No, he has it all wrong; that was voluntary...
He treads the pavement along the Thames, crossing every so often under the stairs to a bridge, ducking to dodge stagnant drops from the ceiling. Reflecting on how much of his life comes down to water: the snarl of forceful, all-encompassing waves; the patter of interminable precipitation; not tears, overmuch, but enough to drip with a certain amount of weight. So much of a weary life trapped in the aimless trickle of liquid.
Apart from one instance, where there was fire – an unprecedented flare of light, ripping at the cool edges of all he created, leaving cinders to speak for his masterpiece. London emerged once more, out of the ashes like a shell-coloured phoenix, the feathers of its heavy wings stained with muck and dripping deluge. Recently, there were lesser sparks – explosions, searing, smoky and never so beautiful; he was brought so very close to his knees. But don't think of that, for that is either after or just before everything went incontrovertibly wrong – except there is no wrong, and consequently no right - just this fuzzy, endless blur of futility.
The city lights have become his stars, but they do not guide, nor do they illuminate, save for what light adorns the physical. He misses Shelley, and Coleridge, and the politics of pretend. So often, he dreams of Prometheus – but his water quenches the fire...
France has always had his saviours, though he swears he never idolised. Russia never gave up on the hopes of discovering a new tutor to sabotage his innocence and warp his half-formed dreams. America relies wholly and devotedly on the towering edifice of his own judgement. England could go on, but the point has been made: we all search uselessly for our heroes and heroines, in whatever murderous form they care to take. Never do they fall back on the expectant crowd, or succumb to the heady, mythical general will. Not for long, anyhow. No! They must have their figureheads on whom to focus – to revere, to foist responsibility. It is the insane meandering of a thousand-year addiction; longer, even.
And still, in this age of stale compromise and pallid nonentities, he waits. Waits for liberation – and, most significantly, for a liberator: a tall, lithe figure to twist out of the dampened ashes and save him from – this.
He cannot pinpoint the moment it all went wrong, for he cannot bring himself to define this particular sense of creeping wrongness. All he knows is he has steered drastically off course, into the doldrums of shallow, indistinguishable waves. It all comes down to the details such as how this shadowed, blue alleyway he has blundered into is completely deserted, and his flimsy umbrella refuses to unfold, and he awaits the genesis of another day, as unique and tedious as every other – the same acrid backwater as ever, tinged with the bitterness of waiting.