What could be my undoing

by newlifeaboveground

When a certain person loses everything that's dear to him, he has nowhere to go but the place he sought out the first time... but he isn't the same person he once was, and when he returns to the Opera House he finds that everything has changed. And not for the better. Major spoilers for PL Azran Legacies (though I apologise in advance if I got the spoilers wrong...)

2. Chapter 2

It was not a man who peeled back his own eyelids with his fingers the next day. It was a shell of one. The world around him was dim, though perhaps he simply couldn't see, the world inside of him was nothing but pain. There was the familiar nudge in the back of his mind, sending short sticks into every part of his brain that was functioning, and he could hardly believe he'd forgotten the feeling in his chest that weighed him to the ground.

With a bland acceptance he stood. He breathed. The air that filled his lungs was sweet release from the smoke that had settled there, so he spent a moment doing only that. Breathing. His family would never breath again, he knew, and so he had to enjoy the sensation for them. Corpses lay in front of him, but he couldn't bring himself to look. He had seen his fill of them in his mind's eye throughout his restless sleep, and only a madman would wish more pain than he had already endured upon himself.

He turned from the scene, he turned from his house, his life. He turned from all of it. Even from the option of revenge, though he wanted it. Oh, he wanted it desperately. Maybe if he could slice the head from the man in charge of Targent the cold thumping in his chest would cease. But then again, perhaps not. He would, after all, be doing no one any good. Not even himself. And he knew that all too well. Another time, he promised the blackened face of his wife... not yet, he murmured to the peeling face of his daughter. But soon.