Title: twice-broken promises
Prompt: Prompt 10—there's no place like home
Summary: He owed them all apologies, but he let her down twice as much.
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Break can still feel his eye rolling in its socket. It's a phantom pain, a phantom eye. He knows as much but maybe from the abyss he's still connected to it.
Connected to that girl, that girl and her lies and her promises.
(That girl and her truths—he had made the wish, he had asked for the change. It happened, he just didn't realize what else might happen.)
Out here, in the cold, he is the only one walking among these graves. It's been years since anyone cared about this particular plot of land.
He had been the last, fifty years ago. He and his young charge, the only survivor of a broken duty. She liked putting sunflowers out, liked making the place look as welcoming as possible.
It's only when he tries to remember her that he realizes just how much he ignored her. What had she said whenever she came here? What were her words?
(Her last ones still ring in his ears, a beg, a plea. Don't leave me. The desperation of it all. The loneliness he abandoned her to.
And he had left her. Without a second glance, a second thought.
He had left her.)
He finds her grave easily enough, it stands out from the rest of her family somehow.
"I'm sorry," he croaks, the words choking him. Falling to one knee, he repeats himself. "I'm sorry."
He owes them all an apology—he should have been there, he should have protected them, he should have died with them.
But more importantly, he owes her an apology. A hundred of them.
He failed her twice, in this world and the last.
"I'm sorry."