Byron: The Dark Witch

Prompt the Third: Laughter, Mistakes and Regrets

He’d broken his arm. It was a different place to last time but it was the same pain.

“It’s nothing.” He muttered to the twittering half-faeling that he liked to call his sister, “Seriously, stopping fussing.”

“But you were never like this.” She grumbled, shooting him a dark look, “You never put yourself in danger like this.”

She moved around the kitchen with a jitteriness he’d long ago learnt to recognise as concern. Her eyes were dark with frustration, her gestures sharp. The innate fae grace was lost in these moments where her humanity flickered through.

“It’s really ok, Aoife.” He insisted, “It’s nothing new.”

“But it should be!” she snapped but her look was merely irked, “It’s never been your style to get so close to these monsters.”

Byron flinched, bowing his head as she stilled, apology on her lips even as he muttered: “That’s not true and you know it.”

“No... Biro... you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t do that. For fucksake you know why this is so –”

“Yeah.”

Stepping back from the sink, she turned, coming to stand in front of him. She held a bowl of water in her left hand and a feather in her right.

“I’m ready. Stop looking at me like that.”

She gave a rueful grin and acquiesced with a turn of her head, “This is going to hurt.”

“I know.”

“I can leave you some painkillers.”

“Aoife, I’m fine.” He grinned back, only a little strained, “Just help me with the bloody spell.”

*

... He screamed. Back arching, bending back so far his body buckled like a bow, and he screamed. God he screamed.

An agony of omens burst through his body. Flames skipped the fine edges of his flesh, lashed and licked at his skin. Burning, burning. The skint light flickered and flared. A current under the sea picked at his boned in susurrus, whispering whirlpools tugging at him... drowning him.

He drowned again. Flooding, flooding. He flailed and screamed, mouth filling with water, lungs burning, he needed air, desperately needed air. Please god, please god, please. He who was living was now dead, we who were living are now dying... teeth, the fangs, the curse. Blood drips and scorches.

He panted, gasped, begged in a room. There are dark eyes. Dark with hate so unnatural to the bluish hue he loved. Can you kill me? Would you kill me? He screamed.

Gasping, Byron woke, curling in on himself, arms folding around his middle, holding himself together. He panted, trembled beneath the thin, white sheets of his motel bed. Tears pricked in his eyes, burned there as deep as the scar marring his cheek from left socket to chin. He didn’t cry. Salt crusted in the corners of his eyes as he stared into the wall. Only one dream could do this to him. Only one man could reduce him so utterly. So completely.

He trembled. He remembered pain.

Then there he was. He was different then. A different man. His hair was light, honey coloured. His eyes were gray. He was alone, pacing a room, plush carpet and warm air. Restlessness swayed him, brought him again and again to feet that were naked and cold. He turned to the window, felt the coil of magick calling to him, tried to brush it off, sat down, stood up again, padded back to the window. He was desperate to leave, to escape... Memories of blood, of his own blood, seeped into his thoughts... there was a bathtub, a hand pushing him under. He was drowning... No –

He was wandering through the night, over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth ringed by the flat horizon... Always alone. Always, always alone...

Wrenching upwards, the witch howled and bent, breaking over himself and burying his face in his knees. Fully awake, he quivered, exhaustion permeated his bones. It was the same every time. One moment he was home, in the comforting slumber of a man without woes and the next, dreams ensnared him, drew him down into the thoughts he’d rather not recall. Atlanta, New Orleans. Days when the impossible seemed possible, where hopes soared high only to be shattered beneath claw-footed reality.

He lived this, his soul had survived this.

Sinking back against the pillows, he struggled to regulate his breathing, to stop the flashes of his thoughts from echoing back onto those visions, the memories and half-memories, the apparitions so vivid they seemed as alive as his own heart. He rolled to face the window as he did each night after the horrors came. Again, it was witching hour. The night was liquid, transient. A navy splintered by stars and illumined orange cloud. The city rumbled past him. Cars and crowds drifted past. Some sang, mainly tuneless Disney songs and top chart hits. Some argued or fretted. Cars honked and traffic groaned. Other passersby laughed. All of them took a little piece of fear from him...

But there was one thing he couldn’t forget. He couldn’t let go. Not of this. Not of the memories of those eyes, those days in Atlanta before the world fell down, burnt and eclipsed into pain...

Think of anything but him, Byron begged himself, anything. Anything...

He recited the alphabet and his twelve-times-tables. He sang the colours of the rainbow in his head and the rules of the solar system... Slowly, his heart settled. His body sagged into his pillow. A new day was begun but it felt a thousand days later. Groaning, he rolled onto his side, pulled his legs up to his chest. Aoife was right, as always. And sometimes magick wasn’t pretty. Healing magick, like the spell he and his sister had performed was easy magick but it was blood magick. And he was an addict. His magick linked to the dark and the wild, to the seductive call of enchantments so easy and tempting... It shouldn’t have hurt so much. It shouldn’t have been abused by him to the point that it hurt.

The night air stirred, pooling in zephyrs and stroking the covers, threading through his hair. It forgave him again and again... why couldn’t he forgive himself?

Blue eyes blinked into his own. They bled betrayal. They swam with sickness – because he had lied. Not even magick could ease the ache in his soul. It would never heal the hurt he’d caused the one person he could ever say he’d loved.

Green eyes shuttered against the world. He prayed for sleep. And then he hoped that maybe Aoife would be back in the morning, just so he could be among family and someone who knew how hard it was, day by day, to love magick and hate himself. Maybe she’d be back. Byron tried to push those blue eyes from his mind but they glowed forever in his consciousness. Happy times blurred into them and tears leaked from behind closed lids.

He needed his sister. He needed someone who knew him.

The wind whistled, moaned and cried with him. It howled a name. And that name was the only one that could hurt him.

Word Count: 1,186