incandescence
He had always been Murphy's light, enticing him into the brilliance like a flame drawing in a moth.
So Connor waited to feel the first flutter of wings.
Curled up on his side on his twin's old mattress, pillow clutched desperately to his body, face nuzzled into the faded scent as he breathed in deeply. The slanted rays of the setting sun slowly drifted across the worn floor boards and provided the sole movement within the silent room as night began to reclaim the earth.
He didn't cry.
Sleep was mercifully elusive, and days were spent staring into the meaningless inferno his life had become; all he valued had been consumed by the fire with horrible inevitability. Just more kindling for the flames; the penalty for burning so bright.
Dreams were painful, haunting him with their remnants of familiar shadows and echoes of long dead laughter, and he fought against them. Against the brother they tauntingly restored to him, making him forget the truth and live in the lie for the blissful blink of an eye. But then he'd awaken, and it wasn't real. Had never been real, and he'd known the whole time. Weakness allowing the flawed delusion that never smelled right.
It wasn't a denial. No matter how much time elapsed since his brother had fallen, there was no forgetting the crisp, cool autumn scent of his twin. No mistaking the sound and touch and sight and complexly simple Murphy-ness that was uniquely his brother, and his brother alone, that dreams just couldn't replicate.
As painful as that was, however, it paled in comparison to the torture that reality offered him every time the edge of the cliff called to him and he was just about to take that final step that would send him falling down into the beloved darkness. Hands that would slip around him, pulling him backward into safety. Smoothing his hair as arms enfolded him, holding on tightly while soft words whispered across his ear.
Murphy.
And tears would come then, because it was his brother who was, for those moments, more alive than dead but still dead. Still dead. And gone. Even while the cherished, musky scent of damp leaves and earth flooded his awareness. Even as he refused to open his eyes, unable to risk looking and seeing nothing there. Or worse: looking and seeing what was no longer his. No longer with him, in spite of the bonds forged by blood and tears and promises.
Promises the whispering voice claimed to keeping, telling him that he'd never been left alone because Murphy had never really left. Would never leave. And every time he heard them he felt like he was breaking all over again… but you couldn't break if you were already broken and Connor had been shattered long ago.
And yet every time the embrace would loosen and fade, he felt another jaded piece of himself cease to exist, crushed under the heel of time. Always knowing that it couldn't last, that he couldn't go on like this.
How much of a person's soul could die before the rest simply gave up? Gave in to the seductive oblivion that beckoned?
And one day he couldn't resist the tempting lure of the dark any longer, slipping silently into it without a single protest or fear. Embracing what he could never be afraid of with wholehearted familiarity.
Murphy had always been his darkness.
A/N: Not my usual fare but something my mindset forced to be written.
May be re-written at a future date... but then I think I say that of most things.