A/N—Disclaimer: I. Don't. Own. This. Michael Scott owns everything.

Summary: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE WARLOCK! *****A butterfly trembles in his hand. Blue winged and lemon scented...He lets it go.

Notes: I'm trying a new style, so please bear with me. This piece was inspired written while listening to Jia Peng Fang's "Lovers." The strings are beautiful. But this is FRIENDSHIP ONLY.

Key: Regular writing is Shakespeare. Italics are Palamedes.

Please read/review!


Butterfly


A butterfly trembles in his hand. Blue winged and lemon scented, its wings beat against his bloody palm, soft as dying memories, delicate as thousand-year-old strands of time, fragile as a breaking heart.


The hand in his clenched, as if clutching something in its grasp, as if trying to hold on. Blood smeared, warm and wet, on his own fingers, bleeding like the wound that killed so mercilessly, so horridly, horribly mercilessly.


The rain falls like a salty sea on his face and hands, and the butterfly struggles to evade it, wings frantic and panicked, in the throes of a deathlike fight against the pull of the taut string of time about to be cut.


"Palamedes?" The voice didn't seem to be his. The strength and power of years of acting on a stage, of lifting up his voice to be heard in a world changing too fast, too much, were gone, leaving the shaking whimper of a child in the dark.


A whisper of a voice. The butterfly flutters fragile wings, beating away clouds of death, wiping off the steamy mirror of memory with liquid soft wingtips. Sunshine through the salty rain, and he sees a blurry landscape, a blotted sun, an outstretched hand, centuries and millennia flashing like fireflies—"Immortality will be a curse…but it will change you forever…"—suddenly falling…falling…leaves in an unseen, unfelt wind, spinning them around like the butterfly in his hand.


The world spun and blurred, his mind throbbing with a drumbeat to a song he couldn't hear—a voice he couldn't understand vibrating in his chest like an instrument, deep and lilting—promises of pain and loss and emptiness in worlds uncountable—


Words. All living, all breathing. "What Abraham told you...don't make it true. I'd rather you didn't."A pair of golden scissors, shining brilliantly, images of bloody talons and tear-filled eyes running up the bitter, biting, killing blades.


"Palamedes!" One final plea before his tears strangled him, tearing at his breaking—broken—heart, before they blurred the glazed face, the emptying eyes, the hand, so swiftly losing strength.


And it isn't a curse. Because it isn't living forever. It's living. Living until you've done what you live for. It just took longer.


How many tears had he cried? No river flowed. Palamedes didn't breathe stronger, didn't…didn't…


A butterfly trembles in his hand. Blue winged and lemon scented, its wings beat against his bloody palm, soft as dying memories, delicate as thousand year old strands of time, fragile as a breaking heart.

He lets it go…