#marcel vc: look i know i must be a weird semi-toxic unconscious presence at the back of your mind but can i stick around i'm lonely

[oncejaw-a]

‘  i  wanted  to  let  go  of  the  pain  even  though  it  was  the  last  thing  that  felt  alive  from  you .  ’ * porco :^)

@vvasilisa (misc. quotes)

------------- You should have. The words form in a mind that is no longer a mind, dance on a tongue that is no longer a tongue, and never fall, frozen like a raindrop in the dead of winter. There is an endless winter here, and he is very dead, so perhaps it is all very fitting, that he, in death, was robbed of his voice. There is not a word that can be uttered here, unless you are still alive; and the living are a rare occurrence in the Paths. Some of them slip through, sometimes; chance upon the clear, light sands and starry skies through an open crack in a dream, or a delirious fever. None of them ever stayed long - none of them remembered. Not really.

You should have. The pain is a tether that binds them; it weighs on their shoulders and strains a brother’s love, distorts it, until it nestles there, right where it should have no place, right at the heart of something that should be pure, and good, and bright and warm. There it is, his legacy: Marcel Galliard, holder of the Jaw, brother, traitor, tormentor. Behold your life’s work, my child: a brother grown up, and broken, and pulled down by your very own string of failures. He had wanted to save him, once. That is all he had ever wanted, in thirteen (thirteen!) blazing years of life: to protect his little brother from the gears and teeth of a monstrous machine that he knew would swallow him whole - the way the titan had swallowed him. He had wanted to save him; perhaps hell is being doomed to gaze upon the consequences of your bad decisions and watch, powerless, as others continue to pay the price.

Porco has not been able to access his memories. Marcel knows that, and he knows it all the more, to his core, as he gazes upon the folded silhouette of his brother before him, kneeling in the sand and grasping at nothing. Porco has not been able to access his memories, but other things has seeped through the Jaw, he knows. He feels it too, from this place, feels himself leaking into sand and down that tether that binds them, an everlasting, nagging presence, one that torments and tortures where it should comfort and reassure. A constant reminder of what they have lost, and a reminder of what Porco is being denied time and time again. Marcel cannot give him anything - save for pain. The excruciating pain of a life cut short; the pain of a promise broken; the pain of watching a beloved sibling walk into one’s blood-soaked footsteps; the pain of a cycle that never ends; the pain of gigantic teeth closing on one’s tender neck. All of it is Marcel’s - for a while, it had been the girl’s too. Now that Porco has inherited the Jaw, all of Marcel’s pain, unspoken and unexplained, is shoved onto him. 

Had Marcel still had a voice, he would have screamed. 

Let go.

                                                                                                                             Don’t let go. 

He watches him, with wide, hungry, sunken eyes. He must retreat. If he stays, it will only make his brother suffer. He cannot; he stays in place, frozen, immobile, before this little brother who has grown so much bigger, so much older than he ever did. And he aches - aches, seeing his brother shackled to him so; aches, as a child too frightened (too selfish) to let him go. 

I am

                                                         gone

I am

                                                                                                                         right here.