Dum Spiro, Spero
By Slice
It was dark.
Pitch. But he didn't need the light to see, he was Kitsune. The shadows were his playground.
Trickster, hidden in the shadows, a slight of the hand, a coy smile, and you fade away.
The shadows were his.
But there were things that he did share. Things that even his thief-quick hands couldn't quite keep safe. Like his heart.
And that was a different matter all together.
His heart was his sorrow, and his pain, and his joy. And it also wasn't his. Some one else owned it now.
Some nights, when the cool wind blew and the moon glistened against rivers shining like spun star glass, when for a moment he could stop running, stop hiding, just stop, he found it funny, in a kind of detached, peculiar way, that someone had managed to steal his heart.
That someone had managed to sneak in, without him realizing and snatch it away, leaving him bleeding and bewildered and cowering in the shadows. Some thief he was, he'd think with a snort.
He'd never meant to let it happen. Never wanted to. When she had left, so many years ago, through the structure of old dilapidated stones, littered with bones and memories and screams and laughter, slipped through time to become nothing but a legend, a figment and a wondered thought- did I imagine it all? Did I imagine her?!
He had vowed to seal his heart, just as she'd sealed the well, leaving him behind, keening and broken and not understanding why. Why he had this ache in his chest that made it feel like he was shattering.
It was just like when his momma and papa had left, only sharper.
And everyone left him. Everyone. The dog and the exterminator and the monk, left in a whirl of dark winds and howls and tears.
And blood, oh gods yes, lots and lots of blood.
And he'd hidden there, hidden from the fight, too scared now with her gone, gone back to her time for reasons he just couldn't understand leaving them all there helpless and hurting and floundering and god they all left him.
So he'd frozen his heart. Hidden it away with a thief's paranoia.
He didn't think he could go through it all again, no, not again. He couldn't stand to give out pieces of his heart only to have people die and end up never getting them back.
And then, someone had gone and taken not just a part, but also the whole. All of it, even the pieces he'd thought never to feel again.
He was afraid, petrified, shaking. But if there was one thing he had ever learned from that girl, that girl with sunshine smiles and blue skies in her gaze and love in her embrace. The one who'd fallen into the well beaten and bloody and – broken?
The one who never stopped fighting while she had breath left to draw.
Courage.
And love.
And it was like waking up again, and finally remembering how to breathe.
::End::
Dum Spiro, Spero is a latin phrase meaning, While I breathe, I hope.
