Caged birds can never fly.
He acknowledges it the first time he truly opens his eyes, the last time he ever cries. Over and over again it will be confirmed, and over and over again he will scorn those who try to deny it and pity those who try to escape it.
Resistance is, indeed, he muses ironically, utterly and wholesomely futile.
Fate is not something to be tinkered with, to be molded and remolded by the moment, by the years, by infinite choices. There is no such concept as choice in existence. Life is a curse, he realizes at one point in his short life, and the illusion of choice, is meant to be its blessing.
What does choice matter, he will insist again and again through the years, when one's Fate is determined at birth? No one ever answers. And still, he will know and guard the answer, even as he asks the question. Fate, is unalterable. Destiny, is not.
He knows that, he's always known it. But even with his eyes, piercing cloud and flesh and even the very barriers of a human mind at a simple glance, he cannot see it.
Or perhaps, he will not see it, for it has became increasingly easier over the years to fashion an image that he has accepted his designed and inescapable Fate, even while secretly, in corners of his mind he does not know exist, he pines for his freedom.
But perhaps by convincing himself that Destiny and Fate lay side by side, he is able to cope with the answer that, in the end, Fate renders Destiny inconsequential.
But while Destiny is forever transient and insignificant, Fate is a script, a tragic masterpiece carved into stone. It is not to be altered, simply to be read, reread and read again and again and again.
Fate is every story, every life. They are all the same, he knows. Someone wants something, may it be truth, knowledge, power, love, happiness, riches, freedom; and, as he discovered so early on, they never attain it.
But he is not the only one who knows this. There is a girl he knows, one who calls herself his cousin and yet whom he addressed as Lady. She, the quiet one, the one who's Fate forever entwines with his. And she desires something. Many things. Acceptance from the birthname of warriors in which she is a healer, passing from the undesired legacy she considers a burden, affection of one she could never have, respect of the family which views her as a pawn to be played and used and then discarded.
She will never attain it, any of it; he knows it, and deep inside, he knows she knows it too. He is her bird, her bird in a cage, and she is his unwilling master and his asset, to be shielded and protected.
A cage and the hawk-hearted sparrow that resided inside. He finds it ironic, every time he stops to contemplate it. Bars will always restrict him, wherever he flees to in existence. Bars of duty, heritage, order, and damned blood, so fine and delicate and yet so impossible to break. There he will remain, a flitting creature who watches the wind and yet fits so snugly within his own prison.
He knows it.
But that didn't mean he has to take it quietly.
And yet Fate for him has long ago been written and sealed, awaiting his eyes to read and his body and mind to carry through. And yet he still finds every day new and uncertain. Foolishness it is, all of it. He knows that, he knows many things, but that doesn't stop his unconscious, unsuspecting heart from dreaming.
The skies are always inviting and clear, when he dreams, and the sparrow who is truly a hawk rides the wind it used to watch and soars away, far away.
But then he wakes and knows again. Foolishness. The bird in the cage can never truly fly, when those who keep the keys fly higher.