eyes filled with tears ; {angel/mackenzie}

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

There was a ringing in his ears, shell shocked and shaken. There'd been a tingling in his fingers for hours as he stood outside the infirmary, not-so-patiently awaiting visitation to open up. Trees fallen can once again grow; an angel or two had been returned to him. Finally, after what felt like a century, the door slid open to reveal a plump woman with teal hair standing on the other side of it. White stud diamonds pierced each of her cheeks as if to deflate them. Mackenzie quickly decided it did little to hide the roundness of them.

"You've been permitted entry," she said. Her voice was kinder than what would've been fair. He wanted to resent her, to have every reason to look at her and spit, but she was only doing her job. It very well may have been her hands that brought his tributes back from the dead. He couldn't hate her, and he refused to praise her. So he found his response somewhere in between, in no man's land.

He nodded quietly and moved past her without breathing a word.

"The girl," she started as they walked on.

"Lex." he retorted. Try as she might, she still viewed the tributes as objects and nothing more; nameless faces built for her entertainment.

"She is still in the middle of her release check up. It should only be an hour or so."

As she spoke, she led him down a long, winding hallway. Everything smelled sterile in the most terrible way; he remembered waking up in a place like this after has games and the only thing that saved him from losing his god damn mind was Jacinta. She'd been there; Angel and Lex didn't get to have that luxury.

His palm began to burn somewhere along the way and by the time the plump woman came to a stop it was practically impossible for him to open his hand from the clenched fist it was in.

"In the meantime, your boy-" she faltered, clearing her throat as she seemed to catch his flash of annoyance with her, "Angel, is ready for visiting."

Again, he walked past her without speaking. He had been waiting all day for this moment, now that it was here, he was terrified. He'd made a vow to Angel's survival, and it was only by Capitol intervention that the vow was seen through. He paused by the drawn curtain, taking in a long breath before peeling it back ever so slowly.

"Angel?"

His voice was a whisper, and the word tasted strange on his lips. Somewhere between a lie and a lost dream. He opened the curtain the rest of the way and prepared himself for what was to come, be it a warm embrace or a venomous bite.

"It's good to see you."

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

I threw this in the fire
Fueled by my desires
Gave it all away

I keep staring at my hands, over and over again, the restless gaze scrutinizing the pattern of scars across its stained surface – the hard scabs and scars, the kisses from deadly silvers, and the phantom outlines of the weapons they had ungracefully held.

The old Angel made it a chore to smoothen his hands, for risqué reasons trivial to recall, so the coarse texture is strange and new, the callousness an alien.

Even after the appliance of the fruit-scented creams and lotions, they remain unchanged, coarse like a tree’s bark. Perhaps, it’s Seven, reclaiming me as its citizen, as a long lost kin who's finally coming home. 

Everything and everyone seem like a lifetime or two ago, reminiscences fogged and memories in untidy shambles. I changed skins after skins, snakelike, transitioning from a boy who romanticized the idea of death, to a divine being that’d learnt to not fear it.

But, some twist of fate says otherwise and reverses the wounds, reverses death. It plucks out Anatalia Morrisen’s knife from my eye, refills the hole with a marble orb, and lets me live. It stations me on a hospital bed and join my veins to white machines, granting power back to each weakened capillary.

Fate does it out of defiance towards me; this is my punishment for challenging it.

The one inside the mirror is not me, but a skeletal carcass that should’ve been left for rot and decay six feet under. It would take months – or even longer periods of time – to settle back in this world, because I’d died and returned.

There was no heavenly radiance in those few seconds. It was serene and cold, aching bones cocooned within the tender arms of limbo.

No heaven above, no hell below. No mausoleum for young heroes, showered in gold.

Only darkness.

Bones ache as an arm reach out for the water cup nearby. I, in a sudden, understand that it is a mistake when my grasp turns feeble and loosens upon the cool glass. It falls to a thousand cracks, a shower of crystal shards, sonorous but not loud enough to mask a voice.

“Angel, is ready for visiting.”

Body slithers down, inside the heap of thick duvets, bracing itself for whoever that has decided to pay a visit. The curtain is drawn, and another hero’s face greets me. Mackenzie Pryce.

His countenance feels like a heavy case of déjà vu.

The brown wreath atop his head, the dark-ochre eyes, and broad shoulders — all trampled under an endless supercut, filled with vivid images of white-bloused oculins and heaven fire and bleak sea cliffs.

“Angel?” He calls my name with the cadence of a question; I understand the reason. The Angel he shed light to had met his demise at the end of Anatalia’s hand. This, is someone else.

“It's good to see you.”

I do not find it good to see myself,

so I mark that off as mere falsehood, a white lie to make me feel better about the dark patch around one eye and the ears healing from their wicked mutilation – that have yet to regrow into a state that could be considered normal.

“Lying to someone that just came back from the dead, Mackenzie, is not ideal.” I hope the glass shards near my bed bite his soles. “I should have died,” Tongue utters, wasting no time to sugarcoat its words. “I wanted to.”

Led the flock astray
Bent and broken vine
Choking at the spine


[ lyrics : rebirth — vancouver sleep clinic ]