The breath.
Evangeline's eyelids fluttered open. She had been dead in the still vision of Erik's fears. She hadn't been asleep. She didn't just breath. She had died. Hope couldn't exist In such a cruel world it seemed. Hope was dead where Cassius was stolen, and the love of his life lay in pain.
Yet there, there was the breath. In and out, smooth as snow melts.
"Erik," her hips were stitched side to side, her lips dry. "Erik," his angel spoke. He was lunged from his disbelief into faith. Into a stillness, a beat, something chugging in the young girl's chest.
"Oh," he murmured. Tears dribbling, wet and passionate, down a fierce mangled face. He hadn't lost her. She was immortal after all, like any symbol of forgiveness ever could be. "I thought you left." She was biting her lip, her eyes red with physical and emotional disturbance. Dribbles of blood seeped where her canines became too intimate with her tongue. The agony of a sewn body, weighing against her ability to express reciprocated love. Though the body language seemed simple, it struck knives into Erik's chest- both in the sense of empathy for her pain, and startled appreciation of genuine love seeping from her stricken eyes.
"Baby" she coughed. The realization poured in like a tsunami. "You're not well, later on sweet one," he purred, daring to shuffle close enough to stroke her blood stained cheeks. To know her existence was real. "Baby," she insisted, an urgency on her face. Urgent for something he could never give back. "No, please rest, he is as asleep and you need to be too." He felt cold, dead and robotic in his comforts, in too much shock and pain himself to give anything along the lines of genuine to the broken body before him.
There was no baby here.
She clutched her wound and spoke, with the raspy voice of someone who had slept for two days straight in front of his diligent eye. "What is his name?" His name. He had been so rash in naming his son. But the name was fitting. It was determining of the memory Erik should never forget. "His name is Cassius," Evangeline's eyes blinked heavily, dodging sleep as long as they could.
"That is perfect," she murmured, lingering between life and dream. It was perfect. By no positive interpretation however, could Erik say this. It was perfect in the irony, the truth- The pain of his displacement. He was the stolen child. The only child. The union of their love swept up in his own father's messy decisions of morality.
What is left of this rotted soul when it's stolen the happiness of itself and it's mate?
He would discover this when Evangeline woke, fully alive as she had been. Scarred for her child, and bearing nothing but the want to nurture him. When she realized the lie was smoke, and Christine had become smoke too.
What would be left of this rotted soul, when Erik knew it had rotted Evangeline's too?