a/n: isn't geldoblame the most depressing guy in the world? i love him. ;_;
He is breaking.
He has always been breaking, slowly cracking along tiny gashes and fissures in his skin that no one else sees. But he covers them as best he can, because even if others can't see them, he sees them, and the memories that they hold within their depths haunt him.
. . .
The first fractures happened with his birth, with his name, with the mother that he killed without ever knowing. But then, years later, he was picked up and unwittingly patched back together, and he happily, carelessly, began to heal around the man that was fixing him without even trying.
- they lay together in the dark, and as those wanting hands run gently, reverently over his body he feels such contentment that he thinks his heart will burst -
And then he breaks again, when the bandages are suddenly and effortlessly ripped from his wounds and he feels his heart shatter so acutely that he thinks he should be dead, wonders how the blood is still pumping through his veins when he feels as though he's been cut open and drained of it all.
. . .
He broke again and again. He broke when his wings withered and died away; he broke when he learned that he could not have children; he broke once more when the woman that he thought had learned the same could.
But then he healed again, with a baby girl who grabbed his fingers in her tiny hands and sat in his lap and turned his jewelry into makeshift pacifiers when he wasn't looking.
- still a little girl, obliviously obtrusive and curious, she asks him how he got to be so old, and his broken heart dismally skips a beat -
But she grew up, and as she grew, she split his wounds all over again.
. . .
He worried often about how he would hold himself together when he finally shattered. He worried he would find nothing with which to piece himself back together again.
With wounds beyond which bandages or salves could fix, he was reluctant to be healed by another, for even if he had once been healed by a man, that man broke him so effortlessly - and even if he had been healed by a child, all children grew up and would break him all over again with their innocent heartlessness.
. . .
Eventually he decided that he had wallowed in loneliness and despair long enough, so he gathered up what was left of him and began to slowly piece himself back together. He bolstered himself with with rage and bitterness and hatred, secured himself in tight ropes of arrogance and spite. His acrimony held him like glue, melted into his being, roused him from a state of pitiful uselessness into what seemed like a new era.
He was invigorated, he was unstoppable, he was invincible. He was the Flame of Alfard, scorching all in his path without remorse or sorrow.
And yet, he still wept. He still grieved.
He still broke, over and over and over again, barely able to keep holding himself together.
So he decided that if he still had to break, so did everybody else.