The girl who didn't care lowered her eyes to his beating heart. It had vanished into the dark recesses of his sleeves; he wore it on his tongue now, not his wrist. It shone like honey and sang like gold, a melody that pulled her in closer, tied her like the lace on a corset. She was melting into him, a smile on her black lips. Soon, he thought, they'd be blue. Blue as Skaia, as the blood of the crook who was to take her away.
Ghostly fingers touched his cheek, his lips, his eyelids. He didn't want the contact to disappear but he knew it would. It always did. Her outline was a series of dashes, fluent lines of morse code. She was nothing but a memory now, a projection of his own loneliness and madness. He knew this much but there was a barrier between his singing heart and the idea of his fingers loosing her ribbon, setting her free.
There was still a hope that she loved him back.
He let her fade. He knew she'd come back, tomorrow, next week. Even a sweep from now; but she'd always be back.
2nap out of iit, aa. you dont love hiim. come back two me.
Through the folds of the night, he imagined her reply. Her voice like strands of silk, her words like a song. Eyes boring into him, handcuffs on their wrists. But no amount of imagined consolation would bring him to his senses. He bit his tongue, flicked at the forks.
"Fuck it!"
Shafts of crimson and cobalt hit the ground some forty feet below him. His heart shattered along with the lenses and the staggering gravity of his losses reached his thinkpan, at last.
kk2 gone.
aa2 gone.
terezii2 gone. ff2 gone.
the human2 are gone.
even my fuckiing dunce of a lu2u2 ii2 gone.
He wished for a shooting star but nobody heard his pleas. He wished for her to be in his arms, for Karkat to be ringing in his ears, even for the hated prince of hopelessness to be snivelling at his feet. After all, company was company, and he was desperate for it. Many sweeps of teetering on the edge of his hive's roof had driven him to the point that he didn't even recognise his own name; but he knew hers. Hers would stay with him, and would be buried with him in sweeps of collecting ash and silt, would be burned with him in the elegant tendrils of morning light. He would imagine, in his final hours, that she might descent from whatever was above to give him a sweet, post-mortem kiss.
It wasn't the letting go that was hard, he told himself frequently. It wasn't the letting go that was a crime. It was the giving up.
But with the last fluttering of his thin eyelids, the last stanza that his heart dared to sing, he had to. It was the song that would make her smile and make him cry and it was the song that she would remember him by and vice versa.
2ometiime2, he thought, you have two give up your pa2t two get your future.