Sacrifice

by witchofnovember

That is the sad, bitter nature of sacrifice. It can be voluntary or forceful, but its results are always the same – you offer up what you so desperately wish to keep close and watch as it is taken away."

"Nothing unusual, nothing's changed, Just a little older that's all
You know when you've found it, There's something I've learned
'Cause you feel it when they take it away"

-Damien Rice

It wasn't a peace offering.

To broker a peace, one must be waging a war and what was going on between them wasn't a war. It was the slow, steady drawing away of ties that had entwined themselves like vines of ivy until they existed as two parts of a whole.

It wasn't a war, but a divorce.

He knew he should be downstairs. On the stage were his men – the two for whom, at different times, he had sacrificed everything to follow and to lead. He should be absorbing the scent of promise and the feeling of electricity that signified the coming battle.

But he was here, instead.

The looks of the others in the room reflected his first thought when he walked through the door.

What are you doing here?

The answer wasn't forthcoming. It wasn't a conscious decision that led him to this room, but instinct and desire. Not of the erotic, but of the intangible and shadowy nature that calls one from the very core. The ties had not fully been severed and they pulled him still.

In the beginning, he had been angry. It had gnawed at him at night when he lay in bed, exhausted and drawn, keeping him from the sleep that had been so desperately needed. At first, it came from a sense of abandonment and betrayal. Fueled by an egotistical sense of self-worth, it chewed at the corner of his consciousness.

When the anger faded, the awareness followed and he realized that the anger was easier to manage. In the moments of his deepest loneliness, the knowledge came softly floating into his consciousness. She didn't need him in the same desperate way he needed her.

He wasn't a fool, thought he knew many thought him to be. His dependence upon her was the most tangible thing in his life. But she silently asked of him what he could not give – not then. That is the sad, bitter nature of sacrifice. It can be voluntary or forceful, but its results are always the same – you offer up what you so desperately wish to keep close and watch as it is taken away.

Unlike most sacrifices, theirs had not been a single event. It was a walking, breathing being that followed them throughout every waking, and often dreaming, moment. It grinned wickedly at them and flaunted its existence. They had birthed it and let it grow until their own child consumed them.

And now he was here and she was here and it was here, too. Sitting in the corner, watching them watch one another. The unwritten language they had so often relied upon to make up their union was silent. In its stead was a foreign tongue, one to which they had become accustomed in the past few months, but which they still could not understand.

What are you doing here?

She silently asked him this with veiled eyes. Before, she would have known the answer. The shadowy figure in the corner would have been witness to the answer. But now they had to struggle to find a common ground upon which to speak. There was no arbiter or translator here, nothing to grasp but the fragile threads that had stretched so thin to be almost translucent.

He wanted to be able to answer her, to hand her back that sacrifice they had both so valiantly made all those years. To present her with that thing she had silently and hopelessly held to for so long.

The bottle and his presence was all he could give her now. Not a peace offering, but an oblation to that ethereal presence in the corner that reminded them of all that had been taken away.

A bottle and a silent prayer was why he was there. Perhaps, no other language was needed.