Inspired by the song, You Found Me, by the Fray.
Darkness.
It had been a year since they had fallen, a year since they had fallen down, farther and farther. It had been a year since she had gone. She had left him, left him alone in the coldness, left him to suffer alone.
"Where was she when he needed her? When things were falling apart?"
She could understand him better than anyone else could. She was his beacon of light amidst the darkness. She had tethered him to this world, yet, she had managed to pass on to the next without him.
Her death hadn't gone unnoticed. It had taken its toll on him, and in turn, everyone else suffers from the circumstances. He had become a ghost-like figure, wandering aimlessly amidst the world. Friends and family approach him to no avail.
He is there only in body, not in soul, like an unfilled vessel. It is cold in a sense. People would visibly shudder as he swept passed them, the slight brush of bare skin sending chills up their spines. Even the most oblivious of people notice something was amiss with him. He is an empty shell of what he had been before. Just an empty lamp, extinguished in misery.
His mother often finds him sitting straight up on the couch, his previously bright sea green eyes now a dull phthalo green. They are glossed over, resembling a glass eye that had lost its luster.
He sits by the phone and his hands are clenched on the receiver. Waiting for a call. All he needs is a call that will say everything is alright. Something to indicate she is safe. But, the phone never rings. It never comes. Sally sees him mumbling into it occasionally, but nothing that is comprehensible to her.
His mother's presence does not affect him. No one's presence affects him like that of her. Thalia drops by, hoping to revive her once best friend, her cousin. But he is long gone. He is lost to her and lost to those around him.
She finds him one day, with Nico to help. He is lying on the floor with his eyes closed tight. The two cousins begin shaking him desperately in fear. Is he dead? No, Nico hears the slow thump of his heart as it battles to keep its owner alive. What it does not realize is that his owner is a mere uninhabited body whose soul has long died.
They surround him. The bright lights jolt his eyes open in shock as he sees vague figures by his side, someone screaming, ordering the other to call the ambulance. But none of those faces stand out like the one directly overhead.
Long, luscious princess blonde curls fall on his face in a caressing manner. A slight smile plays on the lips of the angelic face. The thin white gown flows beneath her as she comes closer and closer till they are within centimeters.
"Why did she have to wait for him?"
She plants a soft kiss on his forehead; it lingers for a moment before it disappears. She gives him one last apologetic look. The kiss disappears along with her as he frantically tries to touch the spot. She was gone.
"Where was she?"
The kiss had meant to keep him going, to never lose hope, but it was a little late. He was gone. She had found him one last time before his final moments. He had been lying on the ground, waiting for her, but she too, was gone, long gone.
The screeches overhead stop as the voices become hazier and hazier, he begins to think. Is this fate? Are they meant to be like this, forever apart? Those bittersweet moments they had enjoyed for the best of half a decade, are they gone too now?
He feels alone. The hero begins to realize as the time slips by quickly, the grains falling down accelerating under the weight of gravity, that in the end, they are meant to be alone. He had lost her, the only one who knew who he was, who he wasn't, what he wanted to be.
The bright light fades away slowly, and the voices gone now into the void. Perseus Jackson takes one last look at the failing light, thinking, maybe this was meant to be.
This was just a short little angst drabble that came to me while listening to the song. It was an experiment and not exactly how I hoped for it to end. But, maybe I'll clean it up or edit it later.
So, feel free to fave and leave your thoughts in the box below.
~TJ