Keep the Faith

A God-Forsaken Right

The way he looks in the night is different than the daytime.

The moonshine would grace his already pale skin, reflecting a pallid glow, and his messy cloud of raven hair is almost silver in the twilight breeze. When the sun rose, however, he becomes golden, shimmering and pristine, wearing a crown of daylight on his head.

But whether it be rainbows (prism rays of delirium) or stars (diamond dust and crushed sapphires) that graced the sky, he remained. His coat was dark against the prosthetic grass, too green to have grown there since time began, his posture hunched and ashamed. He has been sitting there for as long as I can remember, and even when I leave and return, he seems to have planted himself among the fake roots buried on ageless ground.

I've only seen glimpses of his face, occasionally, when the rain would come and turn the gray stone in front of him into something like a mirror, wet and glimmering in the backdrop of a colorless city. His expression is unchanging as well; forever a sorrowful gaze, a lonely little sliver of hope in a black, cruel world. Eternally staring at the name freshly carved into the obsidian, wondering where it had all gone wrong. He was so sad, and he was also so very beautiful. His reflection is a smudge of flawlessness, porcelain angles bearing hazel eyes (sad and beautiful, beautiful and so very sad).

When that happened too, the heavens pouring saltless tears on the self-destruction it was witnessing, sometimes I'd see his broad shoulders shaking; maybe he was shivering from the cold, or he was crying, I could never tell from the streams descending his cheeks. It could just be the rain, after all.

All this, from watching. I never dared to come closer, though I never really knew why. I knew he wouldn't hurt me, and I didn't think he would be one to get angry at some slight disturbance. I didn't know; maybe it was because he seemed like a dream more than a real person. He was my dream; and if you touch a dream, it vanishes, like a pretty little soap bubble or a dancing flicker of flame blown away by the wind.

I wasn't always so cowardly, mind you. I was, at first, but then, after someone saved me, my heart had swollen with faith and love. I became unafraid. Life is different when you have a hero; like everything suddenly has meaning, like you were actually going somewhere. Like you were actually making a difference, just like him, oh so much like him.

But I guess even the very best of heroes can feel fear too, sometimes. Sometimes they didn't want to live anymore.

And sometimes, in my experience at least, they take you along with them.

"You don't have to hide."

Shock sends tremors through my frame, and I stumble backwards. It was the first time I had heard him speak, ever (well, maybe not ever. There was before, too).

"You always come around at this hour." I had a suspicion that he was explaining something to me, but I was still too astonished to move. I had always been certain that he didn't know I was there. Always, always, but then again I didn't always make the best decisions.

"H-how long have you known?" I stammered, my heart beating surreptitiously in my chest.

"Ever since you came." He sighed. "Come, take a seat. There's a lot of room."

He chuckles, the sound devoid of humor, coming out as strangled sobs, but maybe he was trying to make me feel more comfortable. I had an apology waiting at the tip of my tongue as I sat down beside him, finally getting to see the entirety of his profile, and I caught my breath as my eyes began to burn.

You know how when you listen to music or look at a painting so beautiful, you want to cry just hearing or seeing it? Experiencing it? Like you feel so blessed just to be in its presence, to realize that there can be perfection found in the ruins that history left behind.

Well, that was him. The most tragic kind of human wreckage, that a tear slipped from the corner of my eye as I saw his magnificent, bittersweet face. I bowed my head to let some of my hair cover that part of my cheek, suddenly shy of him.

"Why are you crying?" He asked, softly, and it was evident he already knew. He raised his chin a bit, carelessly, enough for me to see the livid red mark that went all the way around his neck.

He was so beautiful...

"Why did you do it?" I blurted out suddenly, unable to contain it within my self any longer.

His hand flew to his neck, fingering the deepened, curved welt where the wire (from a mic cord, no less) had cut into his skin, severing the air intake of his lungs, robbing his body of the oxygen it craved, needed, thrived on to survive. It had spasmed, turned blue when it happened, but of course he doesn't remember any of that. He had been long gone by then.

He lowered his sparkling gold rust eyes back to the stone, tracing the letters that formed his name. Over and over again, torture, trauma, letting it haunt him for as long as forever allowed him to.

"I don't know," he whispered, the pink flush of his lip displaying chapped skin from where he liked to bite into it. Old habits are hard to break.

"You were a hero!" I exclaimed, wanting to do nothing more than grab him by the shoulders and make him understand. He closed his eyes, maybe a bit too tightly.

"You were my hero!" I choked out desperately. "You are my hero..."

"See?" I yanked the sleeve of my hoodie up to my elbow, to display the furious scabs and scars that littered the inside of my arm, a long, thin one in the middle standing out, the gash that tore open the most veins and let my blood puddle on the floor. They found me three hours later, long after the pools dried maroon on the white tiles, my body cold and my eyes puffy from crying. I cried a lot, but it hurt, it really did.

"I was saved by you. I believed in you." Now it his turn to be mortified, as the reality that his death has brought finally dawned on him. He had regretted it, the moment he found himself a spectator in his own funeral, witnessing his wife crumble into streaks of mascara and his brother harden into rigid metal, his legacy of faith and hope stained by the final act that abruptly ended it.

"A-after you left, I didn't know what to do. I-I mean, if you couldn't make it... a hero, of all people, then what chances did the rest of us have?" I almost smiled, at the irony of it all. He is frozen, so very sad and horrified and beautiful, my hero, condemned for being one. I ought to thank him, because I wasn't afraid anymore.

"You're my hero, you know.

"So I followed you."
♠ ♠ ♠
Inspired by Blue's Love. Magic. Faith