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He climbs through the night, stumbling, slipping, fingers weeping. The moon glares down, but only the slight gauzy brush of an ethereal dress lingers in his misty mind. The edges of his core cannot hold, and one by one memories fall apart, dripping down like burning wax onto the canvas below.
There are only red eyes (blazing eyes) below him; only twisted sneers and gapping chasms where teeth should have been; only the empty gates of ruined metal wrought into the shapes of human skeletons waiting beneath his feet. The rope trembles, and he whispers old incantations to himself, full of the power of comfort and silence.
Rhode smiles, and licks her finger, the blood there glistening slightly. It will be a good dawn.
...
He toils and stretches and lingers on, his eye always loitering. There is wine by the chair, a fire in the sombre hearth and dishes on the floor, and he passes them on. Miranda strokes the flame with smoky fingers, nails turning a deadly black, and her tears gather in a tiny rivulet upon the outer rim of carpet.
"When will you stop this?" she asks, swallowing hard through the countless tears.
He flips again, back to her, and his mouth twists open into a gnarled knot of teeth. "Miranda. You're Miranda."
She claps his broken fingers in her own wasted ones, and strokes them gently, gently, with worry sitting on her brow. "Why are you doing this?"
"She took me to her elfin grot," he grimaces, with a sparkle in his emerald eye. "I didn't mean to go. And yet I did."
"Why, why?" Her tears are raining down, now. "Did you not want me?"
"You..." And his voice echoes through the room, a tiny rumble in the cavernous space. "Who are you?"
Miranda looks up, her red-rimmed eyes bitterly watering, and is shocked to see that familiar stare. Those are pearls that were his eyes.
"You're back..."
"Back where?" The stare is gone. Gone, gone, gone like the fragile wind on a cold winter's evening. Lavi disappears again from behind the shadowy deeps of the green windows.
"Here. Home." She presses her hand to his heart.
He falls asleep then, the light in his eye dimmed by the shutting of his eyelid. The elephant in the room clambers out of its bag, and she collapses into a sorry heap on the floor, her throat and chest racked with unholy sobs. The light is failing, and the moon is waxing, and all she can do is weep on the ground while Allen and Lenalee and Kanda and all the others are risking their lives to save the world from rushing on to its portended doom.
...
The next night brings no better news. Lavi turns and tosses upon the divan, eyes open but clouded over with fear and distrust and a hopelessness she cannot place. She clutches at his hand. "Please snap out of this. We cannot go on like this much further."
He blinks, and looks away from her at the wall. "What is that noise?"
"What is that noise?"
The wind under the door.
"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"
Nothing again nothing.
"Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?"
It's a conversation they've had for many moons now. Too taxing to reply all the time, but she lifts her head from the shadows swimming along the ground, and smiles at him. "It's just the wind, Lavi."
"You know me." It's not a question, really.
"Yes, dear." She almost breaks down again – what can she say, really? Shake him, and say we were lovers, you fool? She can't do that to him. She's Miranda, and always wrong. It must have been her fault somehow... she hadn't protected him well enough. There might have been a slip, and Time Record might have left him alone for the demons to get to him and ransack his memories. It was all her fault. All her fault, all her fault, and now she sinks into another drought.
...
"I saw their starved lips in the gloam" he tells her conversationally the next day. "They'd bitten their lips till the blood ran."
"They did!" She says and strokes his soft hair.
"Yes. It was the fairy who did it."
"The fairy."
"She had long hair. Blue, I think. I saw her before, in another dream before memory."
"Blue hair..." Miranda paused. "That sounds familiar."
"They cried out to me" Lavi continued, ignoring her, "saying many things.
"Many things..." Miranda echoed after him.
"Many things." He agreed. Then he went to sleep, turning his back on her. She sinks into the well and sheds another bout of tears.
...
Therein lies the rub. I will take to the roads.
Lavi pulls at the rope, struggling uphill with the cart. It is a long and painful road, and his tracks are inching deep into untouched mud. His back is bent and his eye is dull and his nose is wet. But still Miranda hurries behind, hands clasped and eyes bright, like a daughter of the earth-woman. She has sworn never to leave him even as he trudges around the world, again and again and again forevermore.
"I will not leave you."
And so she doesn't, choosing to follow behind the fiery sun. Her days are dappled with the after-glow of love and the patience of virtues. It won't be long now, she thinks, and lapses into prayer. Please.
A/N: This didn't make sense, did it? Yeah I thought so too :S I was going for the idea where Lavi and Miranda are a couple, but from then on I seem to have failed. Before I forget - quotations are from Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Eliot's The Waste Land.
Anyway, this will be my last piece for the time being, till december rolls around. I'm going back to hibernating/studying really hard for my exams. Byeeee!