A/N- This is a different POV. Just wanted to make that absolutely clear...
Oh, and I know that the summary is a bit strange, but I promise that it has connection to the story. All will be explained in time. You know me...
Thanks for all of you who reviewed me!
He's not afraid of ghosts. Really, he isn't. He doesn't shriek away every time they draw close to him, begging him to take their hands and come out, and he certainly isn't shivering in the nights afterward like a scared child. He doesn't care when they come near him looking like his family. For why should he fear invisible foes?
He's not afraid with each day's passing that he is losing something of his initial resistance, getting more and more like them. He doesn't care that the things he used to like to touch have become acid to his hands and evaporating as the wind takes them away. He is not a child full of fears who lacks compassion. He knows that those who surround him are here not by their fault. He is like them; he is not here because he has made a mistake.
He knows that. He really does.
He knows it's not his fault that he's here and because of that, all the tears of the dreamers are his territory. He is not fearful of the dreamers, they are what he once was, and there was never need to be afraid of him. He knows that no one is angry with him because he is not with them anymore, even though he is. They can accept that he wants to be alone. They told him that themselves and he still believesthem. He is not afraid.
Someone is coming to fetch him again. He can feel it. He can always feel it when one of them is growing near. They call it a blessing.
Hhe says it's his curse.
"Please come out," she begs him for the thousandth time. She looks genuine enough, like she cares and he is the same one who loved her so many years ago.
He doesn't care that her voice is sending hot shivery lines through his entire body, reminding him of other nights where they sat together in the midst of the rain. It doesn't scathe that there is pain in that innocent voice. Though it sounds wrong, it doesn't bother him. It's not like he cares or anything. He can live without her, without her faith in him.
Of course he can. He will.
He doesn't reach out to touch her hand. He's good in here- hiding. He doesn't feel the softness of her palm, the sweet hand he will always remember on his skin and that can burn him alive. He doesn't see her eyes turning wide, trusting, happy. Because he finally came around and that after all these years he has come to see reason. All she needed to do was to keep up faith in him.
And the air isn't fresh outside, such unimaginable sweetness in the air. It is like having a first real breathe, like being reborn to a world where purity really exists. Everything that surrounds him is so magnificent and right. How could he have hidden all those years?
Only, he doesn't feel any of that. He doesn't feel a thing.
He isn't floating and doesn't get to experience the ultimate feeling of freedom. The perspective isn't different; it is not strange and looking different from above, almost hazy and reachable.
The blindness doesn't catch his breathe and his his senses are not aching from all the stimuli and light. So much stimuli and light. So much more than he has ever experienced, and he's not sure he can survive it alone.
He doesn't reach out his hand to touch the void that surrounds him and definitely isn't praying that he will not fall when he meets the nothing, hoping the ghosts won't dare hunt him in the land of living.
But he knows better, he knows what he has to go up against. After all, he was one of them once.
He is one of them.
"Please don't do it." She isn't standing near him now, her face isn't so close, and her eyes aren't looking at his wide open.
"You can't stop me." He, of course, doesn't say those words to her knowing how much they would hurt her.
"I don't want to lose you. . ." She doesn't put her hand on his shoulder and he can't feel her.
The process never began. It couldn't, not while he's still hiding. Not while he is safe.
Only he isn't safe- he will never again be.
He looks at her and her colors are beginning to dull, her face transparent under the light of the moon. There are miles of landscape lingering before him and he can almost feel them behind her. All he needs to do is stretch out his hand and touch them, but he's not ready to let go yet. What was he thinking? He will never be ready to let her go.
Her face has almost fully disappeared. All that's left is a smile dancing on her lips and a great hollow in her eyes. He wants to ask her to stay with him- to fight for him. But it was his choice to make and once he chose there's no coming back. He knows that now. He knew that back then too.
He just didn't think it would be this hard.
"Remember me." Her voice is echoing and he can't be sure anymore if it is she or the wind. Perhaps she is one with the wind now, just as he is one with the flesh.
He still looks at where she ought to be, where he last saw her. He can't let her go, not that easily. He knows he will never forget her. Even if he ever wanted to, he couldn't.
He remembers their time together and can feel tears rolling down his cheeks- real tears, real cheeks.
He remembers how they met, her first laugh and her first smile. He remembers himself before her, after and while. All the phases of time and all the phases of the world began and ended before them. They were one with it in all its steps, while the world cried and laughed, when it raged at them and for them.
"Remember me."
He remembers how she touched him like that before when they spent their last days dancing, and ignoring the world just like it ignored them. Seagulls flew above them and clouds poured over their heads heaps of burning rain. Yet they kept dancing, the world itself couldn't make them stop. In the end, they stopped by themselves. The hours grew late and dim, and they had no power left. So they sat on the beach, empty handed and bare-footed, listening to the beats of their own hearts.
Boom boom. Boom. Boom.
The sands of the clock began pouring in its wrath behind them. Tick tock tick tock, it sang.
But they didn't listen; they didn't care. Then time ran away completely and they were set free. Still dancing, twirling and hovering on the forsaken beach in the end of the world, singing mortal words with immortal conviction that it will not die too, they would not let it.
But ghosts do not have much footage in the land of living.
They did not know it back then. They did not think they would ever care about ghosts.
"Remember me."
He remembers that once he did not want to be called an angel, to become just one more lie in the infinite circle of the mankind, but since then he has had to learn to compromise his ideals for the sake of pretending. Since then he has realized that all he ever wanted was to be an angel. Life as a mortal, he realized as the perspective went farther and farther away, truly and utterly sucked.
So he remembers because he has no other choice. Her words are being etched in his mind and soul, or what is left of them anyway.
He remembers because he loves her and knows he will never see her again.
As the sun begins its voyage toward the belly of the earth and away from the land of the angels, he knows he may not want to believe all of which occurred to him in the last years, but he has no choice. He is standing now in front of the great golden gates and all who come here can no longer turn back. So he traces the gate lines with his index finger determined to come back one day when he is ready. He takes a big breathe…
And opens the gate.
Maybe when the light fades away he will see the world again.
Or maybe he never will.