Chapter 5
Thank you my darling reviewers! Your crit helps me grow!
Sorry for the short chapter, school work is coming down on me hard…
Hughes couldn't help but feel useless, looking at Roy in his embrace. A grown man stood broken, sobbing in his arms like a hapless child and what was he doing – gawking. How utterly useful…He gently closed the door and steered Roy in the general direction of the couch. He watched the beads of liquid lament flow ceaselessly down flushed cheeks. It felt so surreal. Hughes traced a single calloused finger over parted lips, smearing salty drops on them. The pink tip of a tongue flicked out for a taste and the rivers stopped flowing.
"Tell me, please Roy."
Roy found his resolve crumbling, like a sand castle being inevitably dissolved by the steady lull of the waves. He found it inordinately unnerving. For years he had simply punched and re-punched holes into his heart to bury whatever hurts and grievance life managed to fling at him. But of course, one's heart could only hold so much. Roy's tongue was loosened, his heart split open. It was now or never, do or die. Words pumped with pain, hurt, anger and fear poured forth in a verbal torrent - his life of agony and self-starvation.
"Roy…."
It was all Hughes was capable of uttering. He was aghast and thoroughly perplexed. Working with Intelligence had obtunded his emotional sensitivity, but now he was unable to maintain his air of sangfroid. For once his glib tongue failed him. Tiny pins seemed to be needling their way into his soul. It was the sort of pain that wouldn't go away, and while it wasn't altogether excruciating, it was completely intolerable.
Fuck.
The Military was more than screwed up; it was like a pernicious virus, harming all who got twisted within its strangling tendrils of political struggle. Roy just happened to be another unfortunate soul, snagged by the lesser known evils of this low quality cast off of the Ancien Regime.
"Roy, I cannot say 'I understand.' because I don't and never will understand. I cannot say 'It's okay, don't cry.' Because this is far from 'okay'. But I can offer myself in whatever way possible, Roy. My body, my heart, my soul."
Hughes bit his lip silently. I sound like a freaking romance novel…
Roy looked up, his dark eyes glassy and semi-unfocused. Hughes face had rearranged itself somehow…into a mosaic of grief, despondency and disapprobation. Roy watched Hughes, fascinated by the swirl of colours his friend's visage was slowly dissolving into. He tried hard to keep the obsidian liquid from poisoning his vision. It was no use. Roy surrendered to the sweet silence, to the heaviness in his feather-light bones, to the dull weight attached to his heartstrings; pulling him down into the inky blackness of the cold, bottomless lake he had been treading water in one lifetime too long.