Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was something that consumed you when you died.

Something that infiltrated the deepest crevices of your organs, stealing sunlight away into the trenches of your anatomy, places that should never be seen or touched by anything. Something about violating the privacy that was created to stay locked away like cut-off screams or secrets, the ugly, gory mass of what made you up that no one was ever meant to see because no one was meant to delve that deep into your being. Something about exposing the organic clockwork of a body, heart beating as pendulum swings in a red, pulsating display of all the horrors you spent so long bottling up for one reason or another. The places where sun doesn't shine because there shouldn't be eyes to catch the light, the places that reflect the deepest reflections of you to clutch, cherished in your ribcage.

Beautiful. Ugly. Tranquil. Restless. A miracle. A tragedy. The human body was everything that Grian was, wanted, and could never dream of being. The Elders once portrayed mortality as fleeting fancy, a game of puppetry to distract and amuse. Mortals were, naturally, beneath them, not only in body and ability but emotional and physical comprehension. They were, quite simply, the Lesser, as he had grown to refer to them. At first, it felt a punishment, returning to what he had been before, even if he couldn't recall exactly what that had been. Eventually, it dawned that it was in best interest- an honor, even- to witness firsthand the first Great Feast of his time in the Everlife. Not only witness. Perform in. He was handpicked, and it seemed a medal had been laid cold across his collarbone.

How foolish birds are before leaving the nest.

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Grian's eyes fluttered open, stuttering in this unfamiliar task. Eyelids were heavy, dragging down as if they longed for a dormant world just a second longer. His vision focused onto a swaying star-shaped leaf on the tree looming above him, rippling with its kin in the slight breeze that ruffled his hair and sent waves of long grass rolling around him. Grian sat up, extending his legs, which bent halfway down and ended in a sculpted, smoothed-out foundation to stack the human body upon. A connection to the earth beneath him, expanding, ever expanding…

He looked around.

And how beautiful could looking be?

A small whisper of a laugh traced his lips on the way out. Lips. Grian had lips. He felt them with his fingers. Soft, vulnerable, sensitive. He instinctually licked them and- he had a mouth. Tongues and teeth and the ability to piece together thoughts stitched together with words, strung together to convey- well anything. He could say anything. Do anything. Everything was suddenly possible once freed from the constraints of eternity and immortality.

It was like a weight off of his shoulders. He couldn’t remember where he had been, but he knew returning to this once home was a comfort he hadn’t known existed. It was suddenly possible to feel on his own, unburdened by infinite knowledge.

Grian collapsed into the swaying grass. His lungs convulsed with more laughter. Wisps of now-lost enlightenment floated about in his fuzzy mind, but Grian was so sick of the metaphorical, the intellectual. He wanted, he craved the physical, the here-and-now. Imagine craving something for yourself alone. He dug his fingers into his palms and smiled to match the crescent moons left in his hands. Cause and effect. He missed it, dearly.

He felt. He knew now that things truly mattered.

Oh, to feel and know all at once.

Life.

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Scar awoke to himself.

It wasn’t a rush of the sea in his lungs or a tug on his heartstrings when he took his first breath once again. It wasn’t rebirth, to him. He’d been living for too long for dormancy to erase all the callouses the universe spent so long building up. The skin had softened, though, and so things were fuzzy. He wasn’t fresh out of the package, manufactured plastic or a creaky, hand-carved doll whose joints hadn’t moved in a decade. He was still a broken, splintered log of wood, but he’d soaked up a few storms in his sleep. Lichen began to grow in the cracks, and waking from hibernation was more of a dazed transition back to reality than the snap of resurrection he was, for some reason, expecting.

Scar slowly raised his torso up, laying back on his elbows and casting his eyes about his place of hibernation. Two rolling hills rose high above him on both sides, forming a nest that cradled Scar like a hammock at the dip in their meeting place. The low valley was dotted with petals of white and yellow peeking up through the sea of green that surrounded all sides of him, and shafts of light fell onto Scar’s face, curiously searching him as the sun began to emerge over the hillside.

Morning, then. Scar mimed tipping a hat to the light warming him and slowly, gingerly got to his feet, hand raised to block the sunshine he was just greeting from piercing his eyes. He began to walk, silky grass blades dotted with dew brushing up against his ankles as he quietly did so. He wandered, aimless and calm, plucking daisies as they sprung up beneath him and humming a tune he’d long ago forgotten the words it accompanied. So he made up his own, and scratched his throat by wearing it out so soon after it had laid dormant for… who knew how long? By the time he reached the top of the hill and spun to look at the valley behind him, he’d truly begun to wonder.

Who was he?

Who had laid him to rest?

Scar found himself focusing on the latter mystery, which was a conundrum in itself. You would think the missing object would be of more importance than who was in the room when you lost it. Then again, maybe they could help pinpoint where it had gone, whether they saw it drop from your pocket or took it out themselves.

No matter. Scar was Scar. He knew that much, it was branded plainly on his skin, for the sunlight and nodding flowers and all the world to see. And maybe the physical was all he was. Something about how long it took to even consider why he was where he was told that maybe he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Maybe that was normal. Well, anyway.

It was a tranquil place to lose yourself in.

Scar tossed the impromptu bouquet into the dip in the land, like laying flowers on a grave. Whoever Scar once was, he wasn’t enough to stick around. So here he stood, ready to start over with the dusty, watermarked canvas he had been given.

Turning away from his resting place for the last time, Scar spotted a large, knotted tree twisting up from the vast landscape; a beacon for the lost.

As it just so happened Scar was, in every sense of the word, lost.

There was a figure lying at the tree’s feet, Scar noticed from still a while away. Something pattered in his chest at first, a sort of sorrow in the familiarity of seeing still bodies from far off. This prompted more internal questions about the moral character of his past, but he shook the weight off in favor of jogging the rest of the way, trekking a path through the long grass. After quick inspection, it was easy to deduce that the person was not dead, at least. As Scar’s feet came to stop beside the person, he leaned over his eyes, glad to see the rise and fall of the breath on his lips.

“Why, hello there!”

The person stared at him for a moment. He, just like the quick thoughts of death and scars that marred him, was familiar. Porcelain skin with blushes of red at folds and creases, curly brown tufts of hair spiraling around his head. But there was something new.

Scar didn’t recognize the eyes.

The person smiled back up at him. “Hello.”

“You’re familiar to me,” Scar added, continuing eye contact and trying to place it somewhere in his memory. “I seem to have lost it.”

“Lost what?”

“Myself. Do you happen to know where I could be?”

The person tilted his head, arms folded across his chest moving to support himself while sitting up. “What’s your name?”

“Scar,” he replied confidently, stepping back from looming over him. “I seem to recall that much.”

He nodded, eyeing Scar up and down. “Creative.”

Scar shrugged, pushing the embarrassment off his face and into the back of his mind. “What about you?”

“Grian,” Grian answered, almost with a sigh. “And, no, it seems I cannot assist you in your quest of finding who you are.”

Scar grinned, holding out a hand. “C’mon, who said that?”

--------------------

Grian looked up at this…

What was he?

One could say he was a cowboy, a wandering soul in search of those to watch the stars with him to cure the loneliness that follows him like a shadow. One could argue he was a con-man, a liar looking for a naive soul to persuade over into the dangerous waters where he treads to watch them slip away with the tide. One could claim he was insane, a disintegrating mind clawing for a still-intact soul in the false hope that collecting enough might restore his own.

Or perhaps he was a lost soul himself.

Grian took his hand, keeping eye contact as he was helped to his feet. “What now?” He asked, at the world, at the empty land, and at the man in front of him.

“Now,” Scar grinned. “We live.”

Chapter Text

There was something that you killed when you lived. 

Grian had to focus on placing one foot in front of another, crushing a part of him inside as he and the stranger hiked across the virgin landscapes of the new world. The part of him that rejoiced at a bird soaring on the breeze, and water bubbling down the fertile soils of the forest. It yearned to soar and breathe, tasting the wind. He would stutter for a moment to cast his eyes on the sleepy lilies drooping in the valleys and suddenly his feet would follow suit, stumbling until he was down and peering up at them as they dozed over his head. 

It was this all encompassing sense of the new, when he’d spent so long thinking he’d seen all there was worth seeing. When he was sure he’d seen every star twinkle and fizzle out, traced every line of age on the earth's palm, he’d suddenly found himself in the cracks shining on the surface. 

It was like the stranger, Scar, had said only hours before, when they’d both awakened in this world. Now we live. 

And then… 

“You good?” The voice still unsettled him, even with the underlying familiarity that haunted him like a ghost. No, on second thought that’s where the unease came from. 

It was like looking at a ghost, not of a person, but of a past self, a burning crater of memory and smelling the smoke did nothing to revive it. It was gone, but the trails of vapor of everything you once loved… 

“I think so,” Grian replied, taking the stranger's hand as it was offered. As he was lifted to his feet he stumbled again, and Scar laughed while stabilizing him once more. 

“Never had to walk much, huh?” 

Grian put a hand on Scar’s forearm as he straightened, attempting to balance on his own. “Well, no, I suppose- Wait, excuse me? What do you mean?” 

Scar was still smiling, but his eyebrows knit together. “Cuz of- well, you know. Those.” 

“Those?” 

“Yeah,” Scar reached past Grian’s ear, as if to grab something. “Those.” 

Then the strangest thing happened. 

When Scar’s fingers brushed what he had been referring to, Grian was suddenly aware of the wings unfurling from his shoulder blades, somehow going unnoticed until now. But that wasn’t the only thing his touch did. 

He felt covered. No, buried. Smothered with a thousand tiny, itching grains over every surface of his body. He was suddenly drowning in dryness, slipping underneath waves and waves of sand. He was burning. He was being scraped by a million tiny assailants, launching themselves into his eyes, jamming between his feathers and squirming up his nostrils. His lungs were filled like a canteen, and within seconds, he wasn’t going to be able to breathe. 

But what happens after you lose the very thing that gives you life? 

Grian, in the few seconds he was spared to ponder this, did not know as he closed his eyes, wondering how he once knew everything and was somehow so content to lose it all.

--------------------

Scar snatched his hand away from Grian’s feathers nearly as soon as he reached out. Grian’s eyes, the ones he could not place before suddenly became very familiar as they widened and deepened into vast pools, containing one substance Scar recognized all too well. 

Fear. 

Grian was terrified. 

Something told Scar he’d been involved in, perhaps the cause of, far too many situations involving pure panic; his instinct was to apologize, but he managed to bite it back as Grian’s eyes came back into focus. They returned to that same brown of a stranger, and Scar was left missing something he had no idea he’d found. 

They stared into each other's eyes for a moment, one breathing heavily having survived when he shouldn’t have, and the other holding his breath having wondered what he had done wrong. 

In that connection, for those few seconds, the two came to an understanding that this was far from the first time breath was given too freely, held too closely or wasted completely for the same reasons. 

Grian glanced behind him, and a small, strangled sound, like a trapped animal escaped his throat. He stretched his wings out until the tips hit the sky and then spun back around to face Scar. 

“You touched me,” he accused.

“My apologies,” Scar swallowed. 

“No, no, I just…” Grian folded his wings back in on instinct as he covered his face with his hands. “I thought I was…”

Grian went silent for a long while, and Scar stayed where he was the whole time, not daring to move an inch. It didn’t cross his mind to move, even. Scar knew the look in Grian’s eyes could move mountains, stop worlds. Scar was hardly the world. What qualified him to move? 

When Grian finally found the words to convey himself, Scar listened patiently, staying still all the while. 

“I thought I was going to stop breathing,” He began, eyes still covered. “And it was… It was…” 

“Scary?” Scar offered. 

Grian nodded. “Yes. Yes, that feels right. How… what…” 

“When you- when you stop breathing? Are you asking what happens?” 

Grian threw his hands up in a sudden burst of visible frustration. “I used to never ask anything! I never had too, there was nothing to ask. You either knew it or you didn’t, and you always knew it. Nevermind, I don’t want to know what happens. It’s horrible, isn’t it?” Scar almost stuffed in an answer until Grian caught himself. “No, that’s a question I can answer myself. I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know.”

And off across the valley he stormed. 

--------------------

Grian was halfway across the valley before he accumulated the decency to turn around and wait for Scar. 

“Why am I waiting for him,” Grian muttered to himself as he watched the stranger jog across the path in the grass he’d just carved. “What’s there to wait for? Who is he, anyway? I don’t even know him.”

Something in his heart called him a liar at the same time he realized all the questions he had just asked himself. 

As he waited in simmering annoyance, Grian kept catching a blur of colors in his peripheral vision. This only made him feel more ridiculous. How had he never noticed two 6 foot appendages springing up from his back? What kind of a fool was he? 

More questions. He shut his eyes firmly until he heard the swishing of the grass signaling Scar's presence and continued on his way. To where, he didn't care. To what, he didn't want to think about. For now, forward was enough. 

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A few hours later, the two of them had found a place to stop for the night. In the complete truth, neither of them had the faintest clue as to where they were going, but they weren’t going to benefit from staying static and stare at each other and wonder a million wonders til the sun dropped from the sky. 

Walking offered a distraction, if nothing else. 

Grian flopped down onto the bed of grass blades and dandelion wishes, seeds from the puffs drifting up around him as he gazed up into the inky expanse of the night sky. He watched them float between stars, imitating their twinkling patterns of communication. 

It still baffled him, the infinity inside of confinement. The being baffled in the first place. The endless paths of the unknown that cannot possibly be travelled. The beauty in innocence, in instinct, in raw, unfiltered being. 

After lifetimes of infinite knowledge, Grian couldn’t be more content to forget. Or at least he thought he was. That’s what he was telling himself. If knowing had only brought him suffering and discontent, surely ignorance could do the opposite? He exhaled slowly out his nose, his hand fluttering over his chest, laying there, oblivious to the slow pulse he found his fingertips detecting just under the fabric of his sweater. 

Thump thump. Thump thump. 

He wondered who’s idea it was to make the heart sound like a drum. 

Thump thump. Thump thump. 

Or falling footsteps. Rain pattering against the rooftops. 

Thump thump. Thump thump. 

He wondered who could possibly create life. 

“Right,” a voice drifted over the grass. Grian glanced over, and in his trance, Scar had taken to laying beside him in the grass. The weight nearby felt, while not familiar, normal, and he could still feel Scar’s presence in the air when he closed his eyes. 

Grian merely blinked in response, and Scar took his silence as an invitation. 

“So. Who are you? Who is Grian? Do you… know?” 

Grian sat up and looked at him. 

“I mean of course you’re you and everything,” Scar stammered, casting his gaze into the grass blades. “Just…” Scar inhaled, and his demeanor seemed to recover. “It appears we have time.” 

Grian pondered this. The twinkling stars blinked like thousands of eyes gazing down at them, and as Grian stared back at them, something inside him seemed to unlock with the slow click of a key. 

Grian shut his eyes quickly. 

“No,” he blurted. 

“No, we don’t have time?” 

“No,” he repeated, eyes still closed tight. “You asked if I know Grian. I don’t think I’ve known him for a long time.” 

Scar hummed in acknowledgement. Grian felt the buzz of his voice in his bones. 

Then Scar did the unimaginable. 

Then he laughed. 

It was so genuine, so honest, so… human that Grian sat up again to gaze at him in awe. 

Scar’s mouth tugged into a sheepish grin. “Sorry, it’s just… look at us. No memories or explanations or even sense of self. But each other. We have each other. And we can’t even tell each other who we are. I feel like we’re owed that at least.” He sighed. “You didn’t gamble your soul away, did you?”

Grian coughed in surprise, was then shocked by the sensation, which prompted more coughing. “No?” He managed around hacks. 

“It’s one of my running theories. Either that or this is some oddly tranquil cage.” 

Grian swallowed. “Optimistic.”

Scar shrugged, raising his hands to form a pillow behind his neck. “We’re here aren’t we? We’re alive. As far as I’m concerned it’s up to us to decipher why.” 

“Why?” Grian questioned almost instantly, in spite of himself. “Why does there have to be a reason?” 

It almost hurt to ask for his soul to feel so clearly, so strongly about something when it had only broken free of intellectuals mere hours before. He felt like a whip was soon to connect with his back for impudence. Of what, he didn’t know. Something told him the raise of vocal inflection that reflected curiosity wasn’t one that found itself on his lips often. 

Scar’s voice was soft, now. “Life isn’t accidental.”

Grian’s eyes traced the lashes marring Scar’s skin. “No,” he said, lowering himself back down to the grass slowly. Looking up into a million eyes, reaching for his heartbeat once again. The grass swayed, the moon shone. Grian breathed in the salt of the earth. 

“No, it’s not.” 

Chapter Text

There was something you could never fix when things shattered. 

Scar knew this all too well. 

For the little he had managed to piece about himself together, there was always the broken glass. Shards in the depths of Grian’s eyes, the fear that smashed against his memories and was so close to cutting them free. Shards in conversation, tense quips back and forth, slung like slivers of a mirror he saw a younger self in. It was strangely comfortable to his mind, which he had already decided wasn’t the sharpest in the shed. Too used to fragments and bit back apologies left in the guilt of knowing something was wrong. A definite something. What that was was a mystery left not even in the mirror, but what was reflected back at him was himself. 

It was the dead of night, and Scar hadn’t yet closed his eyes. He had waited until he heard the slowing of Grian’s breathing beside him before attempting to sleep himself, although to no avail. He couldn’t close his eyes, couldn’t feel a cool breeze kissing his face or grass blades beneath him swishing in the night air without muscles tensing and glancing quickly about. He sat up, slowly, so as to not shift pressure for Grian, and laid down gently in regular intervals. Something was wrong. Aside from losing all of your memories and waking up in a foreign world with a stranger you feel inexplicably attached to. 

Scar rolled over, facing the stranger fast asleep in the grass beside him. He looked peaceful, facing the constellations that sprinkled the buds of dreams into his mind, although the chilly night air was chapping his lips. Grian’s feathers would occasionally drift in the night breeze and tickle Scar’s skin, but Scar didn’t move. It kept him awake, at least. The little seeds of familiarity in the back of Scar’s mind weren’t lost on him, but there was always that finicky little something, so he didn’t dare drift off. 

His eyes drifted back to Grian, watching the breath rise and fall in his ribcage. He really did seem caged to his body, didn’t he? The feathers, his touch, the eyes. 

Feathers traced patterns onto Scar’s skin, circling the lashes that scraped up his arms. 

His touch… 

Eyes, brown like the stem of a flower. 

The seeds began to blossom, and just as Scar was about to tip into the ocean of memory lapping up at the back of his brain, he caught something off in the distance. It appeared at the edge of the surrounding forest, a red dot shining out from the trees. 

Scar sat up slowly once again, watching the light with lingering suspicion. Fire danced circles around you, charming you so your eyes followed it around its stage. This wasn’t fire, staying undaunted in the pit of night. It didn’t perform. It was watching. 

Scar watched back, and for a moment there was nothing. His heart rate almost decreased as he moved to lay again. 

But there, on the other side of the trees; a flicker, slow and red as blood. 

A shiver trickled down Scar’s spine as little lights came to life all around them, in the trees and grass alike. He squinted and blinked, trying his best not to rouse Grian. 

The lights blinked back. 

Suddenly rousing Grian was of the essence. 

Scar poked at his arm, frantically whispering. “Grian,” He hissed, eyes still trained on the forest as the lights began to creep forward, like a fuse on dynamite. “Grian.” 

Grian huffed and rolled over, still slumbering. 

Desperation tugged at Scar’s chest, weighing down his heartstrings. He knew what this was, he knew and he didn’t know if Grian did. He knew, and he couldn’t let him stay ignorant, not when it was staring them in the face, watching. He grabbed Grian’s arm, trying to wake him by any means short of whacking him on the head. 

Luckily, he didn’t have to. 

Unluckily, the thing that did happened to be an arrow notched in the ground a breath from Grian’s nosebridge. 

Scar had found part of his something. 

—----------------------

Grian hadn’t yet encountered the fullness of life, evident by the imbalance of his experience. Anyone who walked the earth more than a day knew every sweetness carried a shadow, like an innocent rose hiding thorns beneath its petals. 

He’d seen the flowers, the meadows, the sun melting and spreading like honey over the horizon. But moonlight shone in slivers as sharp as a beesting and he was quick to meet the cutting edge of the blade of life. 

Or in this case, the arrow. 

He was awakened by a “thwick” nearby. For a brief moment while his brain rode the slow trolley back from slumber, he thought someone was flicking in his ear, soon to tug. Reluctantly, he cracked open an eye. 

The trolley reached the station in five seconds. 

Grian lept to his feet, quick eyes darting towards the direction the arrow must have come from due to its entry angle: the forest. 

The thick line of trees seemed to be bleeding shadows. Shadows with ruby red eyes that, once the dark canopy released them into the moonlight, solidified into shapes. Some black and eight-legged, a few white and hollowly thin, and even…

Grian’s stomach turned over.

“Go, go, go, go, go,” Scar was chanting from behind him as he pulled Grian away from the oncoming mob of creatures and towards the mounting hills. 

Grian whipped around, snatching his hand from Scar’s grasp while his wings tucked behind him. “Don’t you touch me.” 

A flicker of pain flashed across Scar’s face, but it was quickly overtaken by panic. “Yes, okay, fine, but we have to run.” 

Eyes narrowing, Grian spun once again towards the wave of darkness lapping towards them at alarmingly eager speeds.

“Grian.” 

His feet remained planted forward, his cold back to protection. 

“Grian.” 

They were close. Chatters of bones scraping against one another sounded around the tree trunks and hissing chitters replied from the top. Something in Grian’s stomach swooped, and his hand quickly covered it in an attempt to assuage and digest the feeling that had been shoved down his throat. Another arrow struck at his feet, but he refused to budge, now focusing on the speed of his heart, no longer sounding like the echo of footsteps. 

Thump-thump-thump-thump. 

An army, marching. 

Thump-thump-thump-thump.

Hail bouncing against skulls. 

Grian allowed his eyes to close, facing the shadows with open arms.

Then one word, “Please.” 

At this final beg, Grian cracked an eye open. “Why?”

“Why?” Scar spluttered. “Because they’ll-” 

“Not them,” he interrupted, “you. Why do you care what happens if I stand here? Why does it matter that I run?” 

Silence. 

“Oh, forget it.” 

This was met by indignant squawking as Scar swooped low, scooped up Grian at the knees and lofted him over his shoulder, much like one would a princess or sack of rice. 

“You asked, Birdie!” He shouted as they booked it over the hill, “But I have the feeling I’m more of a ‘do now, talk later’ kinda guy!” 

“You little-” 

“Yeah, go ahead, but it’s for your own safety! And if you won’t take care of yourself, I’m the only other guy around here who’s gonna, so you better get used to it!” Scar shouted around huffs of breath and raining arrows striking the ground at his feet. 

Simmering indignation aside, Grian was heavily impressed. 

Also, just heavy in general, it appeared. Scar’s muscles began to tighten beneath Grian’s skin, and although Grian was dwarfed in comparison to him, he also didn’t possess wings as long as he was tall. As more and more ground was covered and distance put between them and the winking eyes, Scar’s footsteps resounded louder and louder in Grian’s bones until they crested a hill and he was unceremoniously dumped to the ground. 

“You’re welcome,” Scar announced with a pant as the back of his hand reached up to swipe his brow, then rested there while he scanned their surroundings. “Can’t see a dang thing around here.” 

Mid rubbing his lower back, Grian’s eyes followed Scar’s searching ones only to trace a winding curve in the landscape nestled into the base of the hill they were perched on. He tilted his head. They notched together, kind of like how Grian’s torso flopped nicely across Scar’s shoulder while being carted across the hills. He scoffed at the idea as well as Scar’s ignorance. “What do you mean? That’s obviously a…” 

Wait. What was that? 

Scar threw a look his way. “You can see?” 

Something about the way he looked down when addressing him caused his nose to scrunch, and Grian promptly popped up. “Of course I can see. I have eyes, don’t I?” 

Grian had not actually checked if he had eyes, so this prompted a slow, intimate blink to confirm the theory. Yes, he had eyes. Good. That would’ve been awkward. 

A quirk of Scar’s head was quickly shaken off as he pointed yonder. “It is pitch black out here, buddy. If you’re telling me you can see just fine in the depths of night, then we have a much better chance at getting out of here with your feathers intact.” 

“Let me look.” A quick shove to the side, and Grian was once again peering out at that…thing. The surface was reflective and shimmered in the moonlight, like it was tumbling over itself. Why didn’t he know what it was called? “I think it's… water.” 

“Aces! If you’re right, we’re in the clear.” Scar reached out his hand. “Here goes.” 

Grian looked down at it, eyes following the thin lines that painted across it like cracks in an unfortunate vase. He looked up at the face painted by the same artist, or perhaps broken by the same chaos, all of which were inviting him to take part. 

He closed his eyes, and some force he hadn’t felt in a long time propelled his hand forward until their fingers interlocked like the river woven into the landscape. 

“River!” Grian’s eyes shot open as he exclaimed, “It’s called a-” 

His words were lost to a gasp of stolen breath as his body pitched forward, flung down the hillside by Scar’s pull. Head over feather over feet he tumbled down the grassy surface, at some point ripping himself from Scar’s grasp to shelter his head. He was now horribly aware of the fact he was made of tearable, stretchable, breakable flesh, and with every bump or scrape received, he couldn’t help but picture the lashings on Scar’s skin- a punishment. How many times had he crested and spilled down the mountain of experience, and how many people looked at his hands and still took them despite what they reflected? 

How much could you live before life itself deemed you broken? 

By the time Grian landed, splayed out across the banks of the river, he was quite determined on keeping his eyes closed, this time. He’d learned too much too soon after forgetting the tragedies that only came when one tried to ignore them. 

In dreams, roses were always pretty and thornless anyway.