She runs as if she is being chased by the Devil incarnate, with her hands clenched into fists and her legs screaming at her to slow, like she is in any shape at all to listen. The wind is whipping her hair loosely against her face, and it stings her skin, leaving thin lines on her flesh. She wants to stop, but at the same time, she doesn't.
She is crying. She wouldn't admit it now, and she will never want to, but she is, for all that the tears are being brushed away by the wind and her hair and her heart is aching and she is sad beyond what she wants to acknowledge.
She is thinking about the man she loved. He is dead now, of course, and she wants, more than she ever wanted anything else, for him to be alive, and failing that, she wants it to not have been her fault.
And she knows. She knows, on a conscious level, that it was never her fault. It was the Sanctuary, as it always is, and she shouldn't feel all this responsibility. But she does, and she does because she knows that it really was her sin and her sin alone.
Because she could have saved him, if she had tried, if she had taken herself away from her emptiness for just two minutes, if she could have brought herself to become weak for him. And it would have been easy.
But she hadn't, and now he is dead, and so she is running as if she is being chased by the Devil incarnate.
She knows that she is being watched, knows it in her bones and her teeth and in the tiny little spot at the back of her head that has never failed her in matters like this. She knows that she is being watched, that she is being pursued, and so it is that she continues to run, and trailing along behind her, between the thin, pale woman and her other pursuers, is a ghost.
He wouldn't call himself that, of course, because he doesn't want to tell himself that he is dead, because that would be tantamount to accepting that it was her fault, and he doesn't want that to be. He wants her blameless, as she has never really been, because that is the only thing in her that he ever really loved, and by God, he wants to love her. He always has.
She is ugly to him, in so many ways. She is Necromancer-kind, and he mistrusts her, more than he ever expected to mistrust another living human. She is defiant and she is strong and she is filthy, tainted and marred by pain and anger the likes of which he has never found in a mere female, and maybe that is what scares him. He wants to think himself better than her, as he does most, and he finds it difficult, perhaps because he knows that he isn't.
And maybe it was fate that brought them together, in a strange, twisted kind of way. Maybe that was why they were born in the same world and tossed together time and time again. Maybe it was fate that cast her out of the Temple and him out of his ancestral greatness, and cast them together.
Maybe it was an angelic puppeteer, or more likely an infernal one, that cleaved them into oneness on that horrible, stormfilled night when he was haunted and she was hungering, and maybe that was what had driven them to their hate and their lust and their love.
Maybe it was all just contrariness and spite. Maybe there was never anything greater than that.
But then, nothing wouldn't explain why he is here, and why he longs for her now, even when he sees her at her worst.
And in the end, it doesn't matter what it was. It doesn't matter whether it was fate or want or absolutely nothing, because they have been shaped by it, and they are much the better for it. Maybe their lives would have worked out just as well without each other, and maybe they wouldn't, but neither of them truly regrets it.
And so it is that the specter of Skulduggery Pleasant drifts away, longing still for the girl who is left all alone in the pouring rain, as Morwenna Crow ever has been and ever will be.
A/N: I'm not sure about the pairing. It seems a little dull, to be honest.
Ah well.
~Mademise Morte, March 13, 2012.