It's short, I know. But recently some sad things have happened and it's knocked me well off balance, in a way I have never been knocked off before. I hope you give me the support, but if not, that's okay. I just want you all to enjoy my paltry offering.
Chapter 2
Sparda laid his head against his son's tombstone in silence, something like a lump formed in his throat. Was this what it meant to feel "choked up"? As though the grief would never pass, as though he would always be carrying this heavy unbearable weight with him. He found it hard to imagine that he had lost so much in what seemed like a short amount of time.
His breath started hitching, and Sparda was shocked into raising his head from the cold unresponsive stone. He put a hand to his chest, still heaving alarmingly. What was this? And…why did he feel as though he couldn't think properly. Now he couldn't see, his vision had become blurred. All at once, he felt something wet trickling down his cheek and he understood.
So this was what it meant to cry…so this was what it felt like.
He laughed, close to hysteria. What the hell did this mean? He had never cried before, he had never undergone such emotions before. This was sadness, this was true pain. These trickling rivulets down his face where what humans calls tears. He was a devil though, he couldn't cry. Yet here he was.
Dante would have been proud. He'd always said that… "Devils Never Cry". He'd heard so much while he was a prisoner in the Underworld. Just because his body was trapped in a cold icy prison, it didn't mean that his hearing was any less affected, and it didn't mean that the demons around him, and the guards would stop gossiping. In the lonely hours of guard duty, there was little else to do, and Sparda had been able to keep informed, though not nearly enough to his liking. Still, he was eager to listen to anything that the guards let slip, whether fact or the mere stipulations of rumour.
Though he hadn't heard anything about Dante's death. Neither had the demons. How the hell was that possible? They would have thrown a celebration of sorts surely, that the demon hunter who had been labelled as a blood-traitor was finally dead and gone? But there was no party, there was no mention of a thing.
Sparda felt suddenly lost and at odds with himself. Now that he had escaped and was back in the human realm, what was left for him now? What should he do? Where should he go? He had nothing left. His family, they were gone. His eyes caught sight yet again of the words scratched into the stone and the agony intensified, built up in him like a storm. He howled out his misery, which eventually died down to a bitter sobbing laugh as his eyes fell upon the wounds etched upon the last tombstone.
In loving memory of Sparda, a brave warrior, a loving husband and a doting father.
The irony of his life touched him in a way it never had before, and slowly, he stood, his eyes fixed on the gravestone that had been wrongly erected. And slowly, he walked away, determined to find out what had happened, determined to avenge the murder of his son.
And as he walked, the petals from the roses he had left trailed in his wake, a sad reminder that the legendary dark knight Sparda, had been and had gone, with no one to receive him.