Let us not be torn asunder
Summary: Cain, and what he knows but will never voice.
A mini manifesto-slash-drabble written in the second person narrative mode from Cain's perspective.
Author's note: RiffxCain is practically canon. Well, aside from that, the main reason I wrote this is because to this day the Count Cain/Godchild manga series by Kaori Yuki never fails to give me goosebumps up the spine. Which is another way of saying that the series is like the pairing which is completely creepy and weirdly charming all at once.
There has never been a name for what exists between you.
Attraction is too misleading and simple when both of you are lodestone and iron in one, drawing each to the other inexplicably beyond the bounds of simple lust or fascination. Love is too fragile, too frivolous a word. And family is closer, but still inaccurate – what you have survives past the bonds of blood and exists beyond it – especially considering what your own father has done in the name of blood and the extensive bloody history of the Hargreaves family.
He is yours. You are his. The first awful realization of just how tangled you were in him came when Meredianna died in your arms and you clung to him as though you were still that boy lost in the garden and more ghost than little boy. Meredianna is dead. It hurts – you have dreamed of what your life would be with her, that wonderful smile and her soft hands and tender care with you when you raised Merryweather into a woman in the family you never had. But it hurts like a flesh wound, something that can be healed with time and patience. Already the pain is grown dull in the face of Merryweather's smiles and Riff's steadfast presence.
And when you think of losing him, even as you lost Meredianna, all you know is an instinctive clench of fear and nameless dark emotion. You would kill to keep him – and you have - and if this one steadfast thing were to be lost in your life, you too would be lost.
He is the only thing you hold fast to, the one bright thing your curse has never broken, the only bird that you may set free and trust to return to you, always.
So you break when he leaves you.
Who are you, when the constant by which you define yourself is lost?
But this, this you know in your very blood and marrow and soul, if you still have one:
If he is no longer here, you are no longer here, and your own memory will be the epitaph and your hands the grave that will bury you together under a nameless plot of forsaken land.
You say your farewells lightly, but Merry's bright golden hair slips through your fingers like a rosary.
She will mourn two but really, she is mourning one.