#yes two i started one for soren too heehee

[chocolatecake47]

wow the second chapter of my little grief fic is finally here 😭

beta-read by the lovely @a-very-sparkly-nerd 😘, I couldn't do this without her!

"I've been holding on to hope that you'll come back when you can find some peace" ~

Callum’s grief was like the moon, altering forth in phases.

The grief was the poetry that rang in his ears, and the air that filled his lungs. Every encumbered breath that reminded him of the life he still had even though so many, more deserving souls, no longer did.

The grief was the premature drop of his stomach when he first witnessed the agonized expression on his father’s face. His very last shuddering, gasping breath, one his mom had told him to look away for, to leave the room, but the way he curled into his mom’s soft, warm chest and apologized because he never could again was impossible to tear his watering eyes away from. Those first wails of gut-wrenching agony that were shaped like a knife, a double-ended sword, sharp and pointed enough to wedge itself between the gaping wounds and tear viciously.

“Callum, I want to talk to you about life.” Flickering forward in the hushed way his mother would rub his back and remind him to “breathe, just breathe Callum,” and the way he would hold her legs and how she would spin him around when the corners of this new castle were too vast and intimidating. The craters running its length down the silvery fragment representing the delicate climb of his little fingers when he would braid her hair while she told him stories of the strongest man she ever knew. The strongest man Callum would never truly have the pleasure of knowing, and later asked him to promise her through breathless gasps and beaming smiles that he would protect, protect, protect, “Take care of your brother.” The fragility of life, running his fingers through nature’s stillness and soaking its grace into his skin, inhaling the beauty until it was tattooed in his lungs, pulsing like the heart that was too big for his body, in his ribcage.

The grief was the few fragile memories he had from the days with her that felt like a whole lifetime instead of mere weeks, that wicked trick of time that didn’t heal him, reinforcing the serenity she had brought him under her lighthearted teasing and the heartbreak she had caused under her moonlit illusions. His longing built from the shattered remnants of her presence, her luminous essence. As long as she was away, as long as he wasn’t near enough to sprinkle stardust in her milky hair and cast gleams on her blood-drenched scars, kiss her illumination until she understood, “I know that, and you should too”, he was only half. Reaching aimlessly, crying out for the moiety that was no longer there, that had wrenched itself away under the guise of heroism and death “I love you Rayla. I really really do”. Rejected him in the end and left him with fear and grief, like they all had, even though he would ruin his very core and spirit for her a million little times.

The grief was his panicked cry of mourning, the stricken shriek of “Dad!”, almost complete, almost heard, almost there, just like the relationship with the man his heart promised as his dad. Never quite as futile as he once tricked himself to believe but also never quite fully reassured of the last little fragment that was missing, even though the virtual emotion behind it was the same. He could still remember the shape of his smile, that he had winced under the pressure of once upon a time, the sound of his laugh as it rumbled in his chest, the closeness of it fresh in his mind from those few nights he had been carried to bed, flustered and blushing, but loved. Undeniably cherished

The grief was the facade he put on, “you doing okay?”, the aimless show of ravaged resilience, even though the moon never set, the tainted reminiscence of all he had lost never sincerely vanished. It lurked instead, hid shamelessly in the guilt of the burden that now hung on young shoulders, but was keen enough to camouflage against the pale sky and conceal behind the clouds. But the moon revolves around the world, so he would try to swallow it down and revolve around his world, “you mean everything to me”. Give more parts of himself to those starry blue eyes, breezy laughter, and beautiful shining smile, until there was nothing left in his barren soul to give, the same way the moon bestowed everything to the sky until it was hollow and dark. Millions of instances all throughout his childhood where he had rushed to care for him, to carry him up, and would do again in a single heartbeat, shimmering the last of his courage during the coldest and loneliness of nights until it was purposed for him, the way the moon projected onto the world, but it still wasn’t enough, he still wasn’t good enough for the only child he would spill his own blood for without hesitation.

Sometimes he was sure that half his mother’s lost soul had been given to Ezran and half had been given a new home in Rayla. And so he couldn’t give up, no matter how heavy it got, not when even a fraction of her could still be there, in the people he loved. So he yearned and ached and fought, fought against the overpowering grief, so that one day, maybe, just maybe, he would be as beautifully radiant as the moon.