how will i know? [sparrow w/archie]

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back, nor even one forward. Not one thought was to be provided either to the past or the future; the first page of his life had been one so heavenly sweet, sickly so, that to delve back into it dissolved his courage and broke down his mind. The latest page was an awful blank, something like the hollow darkness that shrouded within his chest, devoid of even his erratic heartbeat, the sound lost to time. The tightness in his chest, the one he had thought of as one end of a cord tying him to his former life, everything he once knew, had pulled so taut that it had long since strangled his heart, it's final protest being one of terror and desperation, the world having bleached through as if it was acid. Sad people had the gift of time, while the world dizzied everyone else; they remained stagnant, their bodies refusing to follow pace with the universe. With such kinds of people everything ached for too long, everything moved without rush, wounds were always wet. How was one to run and play when they felt like there were bricks of the heaviest sadness weighing down every part of their body? How did one laugh and talk when there were no laughs left inside of them? Still, he was forced to eat, to drink, to sleep, and to wake again, if only for the sake of those few he still held close. For the kids, for Gwen... For Vivi. Still he must pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled, for he would do anything to prevent them getting caught in the same melancholy hell as he, so plagued with the notion of death that it destroyed them. Though, his predicament was not the result of Quintin's death alone. No, it was years upon years of dejection, abandonment.

The past eight months or so (he'd long since lost count, the notion of time lost to the darkest recesses of his mind) had been more confusing than he could ever begin to anticipate. Quintin had been slaughtered in cold blood, so much more ruthlessly than he deserved, cut down before even able to see the light of life. Vivienne had stumbled into his life, and he blindly fallen deeply for her. The kids had been born, their resemblance to their father stunning, only sending more guilt into his heart. Vera had reappeared at the most unexpected time... And Cody... Cody had simply abandoned him, stripping him of every emotion, ever memory, ever heartbeat he had left. It had been he final blow... Recently, however, he had sworn to exile his thoughts if they were to think of the wolf again, to rip his lips clean from his face if they spoke of his name once more. Even such a statement could barely rid him of thoughts of the canid shifter. The memory of truth no longer remained pure in the mind of a liar. Abandonment didn't have the sharp, but dissipating, sting of a slap. It more resembled a punch to the gut, bruising skin and driving precious air from the lungs. They said that water was sometimes thicker than blood. Though, through his eyes, it was also more treacherous, prone to betrayal, full of shit and quite honestly, he wouldn't put much weight on it all. He prevented himself from trusting since the vicious alignment of incidents, for there was nothing more unreliable than the fragile hearts of mankind. The greater the capacity to love, the greater the capacity to feel pain; life was a series of disappointments, broken only by dark spells of depression, ended by a numbness unrivalled that came with death. Why was it that he had already been plunged into such cold, emotionless times within life? He'd done his fair share of crying, especially when there was no other way to discard the fragments of his heart that constantly tore at his innards. They said that men weren't supposed to cry, though he'd never truly believed in such foolish words. Crying was a way to discard feeling. Feeling was living. Tears shed and blood falling was all that gave him the knowledge that he was still living.

He'd even taken the slightest glance into the equestrian world, purchasing an equine of his own. She was a petite little thing, but it was something to focus on. Tending to her brought him something to fall back on, and the knowledge that even just the one being depended on him was oddly comforting. Halfway home, the sky faded from a bland grey, to a charred colouration resembling that of tourmaline, the faintest sign of thunder rumbling on the distance accenting the first sign of downpour. Large, heavy droplets, they drenched him in seconds, like an overturned bucket sourced from the skies above had been poured upon him. His hands reached upwards, pace quickening, as if that could prevent him from becoming wetter, halt the oncoming downpour, until it finally hit him how hilariously futile his attempts were of trying to stop the rain. A snort of bemusement swept into the faintest hint of a chuckle, broad grin splitting cross his facials, troubles all but forgotten at such a point. As a pose to hurrying to upper ground, rushing to the safety of the indoors, he leapt lower, racing through the rain in an odd moment of bliss. And what's more, in such an absurdly timed moment, he figured that one required sadness, just as the world need the rain. Thoughts and ideas poured through his awareness. Happiness had almost become a frightening prospect. Plus, that gleeful feeling always left so fast. Sadness lasted longer, causing it to be more familiar, more comfortable. But maybe, he thought, there was a way to find some happiness in sadness. Like rain, it could not be avoided. Getting caught in the warm, wet deluge that particular day in that terrible summer full of wars and fires that made no sense was a wonderful thing to have happen. It taught him to understand rain, not to dread it. There were going to be days, I knew, when it would pour without warning, days when he'd find himself without cover. Though, his understanding acted as well as any cover; it was preparing him for stormy weather, arming him with the knowledge that no matter how hard it seemed, it couldn't rain forever. At some point, he knew, it would come to an end.

However, all such thoughts, the brief, blissful oblivion of joy, was discarded upon the sight of the church, shrouded in the solemn silence, the resounding sorrow. His gleeful expression steadily fell from his facials, and as if powered by some strange subconscious mechanic, he slowly shifted his frame towards it, darkened crimson eyes, abruptly clouded with despondency, slowly studying the outlines of various graves. The truth was, there were few that cared for Quintin. Himself, Gwen, Lilly... Those were the few that the man had been able to associate with himself, the memories that they withheld were all that remained of the man, and all that would pull through. The tenebrous air was barely enough to falter his sense of direction, for the placement of the destination in mind had been firmly set within his thoughts. The lacklustre of the skies failed to dismiss the malnourished man, monotonous setting barely acknowledged. Quintin... he thought, roughly swallowing against the forming lump within his throat. Quintin... The vast piceous tone of various graves fleeted past his gaze, pace slow, though as he approached the familiar area, his eyes caught the frame of another being. A sharp intake of breath caught within his throat, studying the frame of the doubled over being. Even through dulled senses, an oddly sharp, familiar smell wove its way through the air. I know that scent... A long pause cast through his thoughts, numbness frequenting his thinned frame.

Cody...?

It was no more than the illusions of a guilty man, surely. Though, the longer he stood there, the more acute his senses grew zoning in on the soft cries that wracked the frame of the being before him, the more the familiar scent became apparent, the more real the sight became. Cody... The fragments of his heart that had been drawn, stitched, glued, repaired so delicately abruptly came sinking back into the base of his ribcage, displaced yet again, pain driving through his lungs with each shuddered intake. Cody... One by one, droplets fell from his own eyes, each one commemorating something he had lost, stuck upon an assembly line. Everything he had once had, everything he once knew... Everything the wolf had stripped from him. Hope, faith, pride, joy, trust, security, independence, freedom. His heart had been enslaved by the shifter. The sight of such aching beauty infused his soul with pain, each tear that slipped down the wolf shifter's facials matched by a pain that speared through the mongrel's own chest. Cody... And in that moment, his world came crashing down once again, one question becoming apparent in his mind, overcoming his every thought.

Why...?

He wasn't simply referring to why the hell the wolf shifter was here, no. He was questioning everything. Why had the wolf attacked Quintin? Why did he leave? Why did he abandon him without so much as a second thought? Somehow, though, he found himself unable to turn away, and despite his mind screaming against it, his heart ached to be near the softly crying man. His feet moved of their own accord, each pace painful, and only a few steps seemed to take seconds. A choked sob caught in his throat, swallowing it back down for the fear of the presumed illusion slipping away like the real man had done. A violently trembling limb gradually extended, and expecting the vision to fade at soon as his fingers came into contact, shock tightened in the pit of his stomach like a cold fist as his hands settled upon the shoulder, feeling the delicate, resonating warmth, of another living being. In that second, he could almost feel the pulsing of the blood beneath the flesh, the faint racking of the body as choked sobs weaved their way from the wolf shifter's throat. His gaze wavered, dropping to the ground, somehow unable to remove his hand, grip slightly tightening against the shoulder as he struggled to find something adequate to say, delving into the recesses of his mind, only coming back empty handed. Crimson irises clenched shut for the briefest of moments in a failed attempt to stem the flow of tears that wove their way down his facials, a slow, deflating huff heaving through his lungs. This man was once the way his heart would beat, the words he spoke... But who was he to tell him he should stay? Loss was a knowledge he was sorry to have.

Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, was watching it replay anew in another, all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that had to be sung. "Y-you..." he began, his words accented by a radiating pain, "y-you left m-me... With n-nothing..." What the hell was he supposed to say? This wolf had completely torn his world apart, sent him spiralling down into a state of melancholy madness... Why did he still feel for him? "... Jesus C-cody..." he whispered, his gaze briefly twisting to the grave, exactly where the wolf had sent the dishevelled man the mongrel held so dear. The numbness slowly returned, consuming his soul, though the tears remained, slowly sweeping down his face. "Every... E-every day I h-had to t-tell m-myself that it w-was okay... T-that I was o-okay..." His eyes clouded, the heartbeat he thought he'd lost pounding loud and clear within his chest, drowning out the pouring rain, his shaky breathing. "B-but it's n-not okay... It's n-never okay..." A long pause shrouded the air, the hand that wasn't upon the shoulder of the shifter extending to graze the surface of the grave. "A-and once you k-know that...?" Another long pause, his thoughts going out to Quintin, driven so far by society to the point of utter selfhatred. He had sworn to himself that he'd never be like the avian-man, though they were now more alike than he could ever imagine.

"There's n-no going back..."

WORDS 2091
TAG Cody Miller played by RENDEZVOUS
MUSE all you never say
NOTES ... CARCHAIC STAHP PLAYING WITH MY EMOTIONS OMFG </3 D'x

A phenomenon that a number of people came to note while submerged within a deep depression was the sense of being accompanied by a second self; a wraith-like observer, whom, not sharing the dementia of his double, was able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggled against the oncoming disaster, or decided to embrace it. There was a theatrical quality surrounding it all, and during the course of his own melancholia, the man had just about been preparing for extinction, unable to shake the sense of melodrama - a melodrama in which he, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and the lone member of the audience. In severe forms, depression paralyzed all of the otherwise vital forces that made one human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and a deadened state. Life was bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to enable a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings were lost to everything dark and drained of feeling; the slippage into futility was first gradual, then utter. Thought, which was as pervasively affected by depression was mood, was morbid, confused, and stuporous. Vacillating, ruminative, indecisive and self-castigating. The body was bone-weary, the existence of will ceased, and nothing at all seemed worth it. An irritable exhaustion swept into every crevice of thought and action alike. Sleep was fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming; for nights he had barely slept, though in spite of the time spent within far-from-peaceful slumber, each morning he felt the same lassitude, a languor that weighed upon him throughout the day. A strange melancholy had stolen over him, one that oddly, he would not have interrupted; dim thoughts of death had opened, and an idea that he was sinking took ragged, and not exactly unwelcome, possession of him; his soul acquiesced within it. The diabolical thing regarding it all was not that it caused such deep despondency, yet the fact that it caused one to become conceited and short-sighted; near arrogant. One lapsed into bad taste, believing themselves to be something akin to Heine's Atlas, of whom's shoulders supported the entirety of the world's puzzles and agonies, as if those thousands, lost within the same maze, did not endure the same misery. Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself into his life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible, like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion; it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure, until suddenly, everything was shrouded in a cobalt pitch. Most things withheld the capability to be forgotten over time; even war itself, the life-and-death struggle of humanity was now something of the distant past. One became so caught up within their everyday life that events of the past no longer orbited their minds. Though regardless, no matter how much time passed, no matter what took place within the interim, there were some things of which one could never truly assign to oblivion, memories that could never be rubbed away, that remained forever, like a touchstone. And, as unfortunate as it was, the events that had occurred within this damned town would likely stick within his mind for at very least a good portion of the remainder of his time upon this earth, regardless of how each and every second had pained him.

The faint stiffening of the shoulder which his hand was situated upon drew a subtle flinch from the mongrel shifter, irises hued a cardinal crimson momentarily fleeting from view, closing with a trace of a huff, combating the urge to merely flee from the scene, from the inevitable pain of the moment. His lungs grew abruptly heavy, as if water had filled them, however, for the sake of the wolf, he allowed himself to drown. The abrupt notion of limbs furling around his drastically thinned frame had the dark-haired man's eyes rapidly reopening, widening, momentarily shocked out of the weighted feeling of his chest. Instinctively, he stumbled a step back, blinking, stealing a sharp intake of air that burnt through his throat, though only found the arms tightening around him following his spoken words. Slowly, his expression softened, tears still slipping from evidently watered eyes, studying the man with an evident wince. And for several moments, that was all he provided, merely standing within the arms of the fellow shifter, somehow unable to tear himself away for some odd feeling in the pit of his stomach, of which he had tried to deny the existence of since the incident.

However, the wolf's own words promptly had the once brutish man's reluctant wince fading, knotting abruptly into an expression of irritation, of annoyance. "Who the fuck told you that, kid?" A snort left him, barely acknowledging his own usage of the once affectionate nickname he used to use for the canid, gaze twisting downwards, studying the terrain below them as if more interesting than the fellow shifter's own face. "There's nothing worth shit in the present, nevermind the-... I-... J-just..." A huff fleeted from the man, agitated expression fading just as swiftly as it had appeared, head shaking briefly in dismissal. "W-what else do y-you e-expect me to d-do, Cody?" However, as the sobs of the self-proclaimed murderer before him drew forth, the mongrel shifter's eyes softened, a sudden form of empathy plaguing his mind; had the wolf been stuck in as much pain as he, all this time? Had everything, all the mourning of the wolf, all the moping over his abandonment, been needless? Could the dark-haired man have revived whatever odd relationship they had? He listened intently to the man's sorrowful lament, each word, each strum of the vocal chords striking somewhere deep. His jaw clenched in a pitifully futile effort to starve off the emotions welling within his chest, the despondency he'd fought down over the past week resurfacing. A shaking exhale left the male, only able to muster a simplistic, quaking, "g-goddammit, Cody..." in response, which was just as unsatisfying and inconclusive to him as it likely was to the wolf, vocals thick with sorrow, confusion and irritation alike. Crimson hued irises hinted at faint desperation, trying hopelessly to collect his thoughts and translate them into a jeremiad of which the wolf might understand. "Don't you see? I don't fucking care about all that. I don't w-want y-your apologies, your r-reasons, anything. I never w-wanted them. Cody, I wanted y-you. I needed you t-there, of all fucking people. A-and you j-just... You..." The male stole a hesitant, breathless pause, as if ashamed of the words he was vocalizing, frowning as his gaze fixated upon the male's own deep hazel orbs, studying their hues intently for a good moment or two. "Left... H-how am I supposed to k-know that you w-won't d-do that again?"

The man blinked rapidly in confusion as the shifter trailed off, leaving him caught on the notion of forgetting something, brow furrowing. "Forgetting what, Cody? Forgetting Vera? Forgetting Vivienne? Forgetting Q-Quintin? Forgetting... F-forgetting you?" His voice wavered, as if petrified of such a notion, though crimson hued irises remained fixated upon the canid shifter with panther-like precision, despite being dampened with tears, as if trained purely to track the features of the man himself. Still, he bit back the urge to reach out once more to the wolf, merely enabling the fellow shifter's anger to take it's course, observing in solemn silence 0as he rather needlessly kicked at the grass as if it had wronged him. However, the man winced lightly as the self-proclaimed murderer spoke again, and once more, he found himself somehow unable to believe that the dishevelled man's name, and an end that brings only connotations of rotting corpses, would be placed within the same sentence. Once again he felt himself consumed by the thought of everything being some sort of twisted fantasy, a hallucination, a dream, a nightmare; anything that meant Quintin was somewhere, someplace, and ultimately safe. Lest, reality had a way of inflicting a pain that could only be described as a punch in the gut with a cold fist, knotting within his innards, cringing as if suddenly in pain. Still, he forced himself to listen, to hear out the wolf, to take in everything he said, for the sake of withholding any form of future, of any memory, of any existence. Something that was further than either of them could see. His mouth opened as if to protest against the spoken notion of nobody believing the wolf, of him being nothing more than a murderer, though his silence had formed a chokehold, rendering him unable to say anything without the fear of spilling everything he kept within his heart, every dark recesses of his mind, strangled back into noiselessness, only able to watch the fellow shifter morph into his canid counterpart and edge backwards. He wanted to say that the words spoken were false, that he was still living, despite the wolf 'killing everything that moved'. Yet, the truth was, he had long since deceased, and the reality was that the vast majority of each and every death, with each passing hour, had been the result of the wolf's actions. Fuck, why the hell was he still so willing to invest everything into this man? The fragility of his mind and heart alike was something best suited to man, not such a beast as he.

Regardless, his attention snapped abruptly back to the man-turned-wolf, surveying the dark hide of the canid, his eyes briefly grazing over the scar left from the instance in which Gwen had attempted to protect Quintin. Crimson hued orbs dulled slightly, though fixated back upon hazel irises, studying them, enslaved by the solemn silence he seemed caught up within. The words that the wolf vocalized, however, enticed a faint huff from the dark-haired man; despite it all, he still wanted no more than the shifter to stay, to be within his company. "M-maybe not," he mumbled quietly, slowly beginning to move forward towards the wolf, a hand subconsciously reaching upwards to remove streams of tears from his facials. "B-but... I'm g-gonna be h-honest here." His eyes scanned the canid, kneeling down before the nervous beast, vocals reading nothing less than utter sincerity. "I'm more than glad you did." Without an ounce of uncertainty, the shifter's hand extended in effort to gently reach for the wolf's facials, attempting to give a gentle pet to the forehead of the brown-pelted canid, a faint smile tracing his lips. However, his expression clouded, appearing distant, after only a few moments, giving a long, silent pause, before murmuring monotone, "is it b-bad that j-just for a second I... I thought we were g-going to m-make it?" An uneasy glance was cast towards the grave of the avian-man, huffing quietly. "B-but... I guess in the end whatever t-the fuck I h-hoped doesn't m-matter..." A hesitant pause. "It n-never will." And yet, the artificial warmth of his smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind seen upon miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, remained behind as an ironic remnant. That was all he could do.

WORDS 1862
TAG Cody Miller played by RENDEZVOUS
MUSE all you never say
NOTES the poor bbies omfg </3