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"Sometimes I think,
I need a spare heart to feel
all the things I feel."
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
I - Death
Death. It's supposed to be unstoppable and uncaring and vicious, from what Prishe gathers.
Prishe isn't scared of death. And it's not because she's an immortal apocalypse-bringer or an abdominal unaging demon or some other prophetic shit like that.
She's long decided it's worth dogshit to worry about when it's gonna claim her. Humes, Elvaans, Tartarus, every single living thing — duh — are meant to live, to thrive on every breath. And as much as life can be a troublesome little bitch for her to manage most of the time, she knows that if it's even just a little possible to keep moving forward, that she'll keep her head up and her feet forward. Got a bloody chunk of your friend's blasted-out heart on your shin? Wipe it off, get a grip, and keep moving the fuck forward, no matter what. Don't find stupid excuses to die or stop your progress.
Thinking about when it's her turn to die is a big fucking waste. So when it threatens her, knocks on her door? She'll stare it on, let it come; let it go. She'll even love the hell out of it.
Because, yes, it's actually a pretty convenient thing to know about, death. Because Prishe knows, knows damn well better than any other Hume or Elvaan or Tartaru, that mortals aren't meant to last long. Because, to be frank, too much time spent on a single life really sucks. It rots away your normalcy, ironically makes your life of very little worth and meaningless.
Inhaling hot desert air, Prishe rubs her dusted-over eyes. Ropes of grit-tainted wind whip through the pathetic fabric of her torn sleeves. Whole battalions of the damned stuff splay amongst her clenched brow and slither through her nostrils. They're unstoppable and uncaring and vicious. Way, way worse than death.
It's just a fucking moment, after all.
II - Love
During a starless night of keeping watch at a sorry excuse for a camp, Terra Branford thinks of love.
What is it, exactly? She searches the aimless corridors of her mind for an answer and finds none. It's like there is only emptiness and unanswering demons wherever she looks, in her mind and not; in an uncradled, unloved night sky that has no radiance to share; in a desert that only knows of dread and decay.
Bringing frail, dirt-caked fingers up to her face, she brushes away the green strands of hair that thrash upon her features. In the corner of her cleared sight, she sees Lightning a few feet away from her, catches what seems to be every saddening detail about her; the slumped shoulders, the way she grips the middle of her chest at some metal pendant, the chaotic and evil scars that are scattered around her soiled legs and arms, the low gaze that tracks the little hills of sand around her feet, looking for something that clearly isn't there...
There is something strange in Terra's chest; something heavy, cruel, ruthless, and it pries open a gap in it that reason can't mend.
She does not know what to call this feeling, but it's not something new to her, either. It comes naturally to her, the way her name did when she had to remember it. So she trusts it, lets it guide her to wherever it wishes to wander.
Step after step, this feeling guides her toward Lightning. She figures, perhaps, because Lightning's not devoid of feeling like most of this world, that she has the answers she needs.
Lightning does not move her gaze. "What, Branford?"
Lightning's words seem keener than her blade, cleaner than herself, and Terra tenses. She should've thought of what to say, how to ask her. Her mind does not work as she desires, and her tongue stumbles over unharvested words and scattered half-sentences. She stares at the ground, thinking, searching, feeling stupid.
There is some sixth sense that tells Terra that — oh my goodness, I'm so sorry — Lightning's eyes are tracing her, waiting. Terra does not meet them. In the hectic mess of a mind she has, frayed and distorted and yet void at the same time, she's already decided she doesn't deserve to do that.
Terra finally gathers some form of what to say, and she holds her own arm. Ripped and stretched fabric ripples around soil-filled nails in the space of a second. "What… What do you think love is?"
In the dark edges of her vision, she notices Lightning cross her arms and step forward. She'd forgotten that Lightning stood some inches taller than her; that she'd been grounded and decisive, holding her head high most of the time, unlike her.
It's like some sort of superpower.
"Love, huh?" A sound of deliberation, rough and wondering and dull, meets her ears. "Hell if I know how to explain it."
A slow, careful desert wind slips around them. Cold and unfamiliar as Lightning's response, along with everything about Dissidia Terra's come to learn about, it's another feeling that weighs her down. The concept of love, something she thought to be potentially comforting, now just another burden on her drained mind. The irony's almost too much for her to take. In response to her words, Terra finally meets her gaze, and though she tries to hide the dissatisfaction and hurt that wants to dominate her face, she can tell Lightning's already caught it.
She takes a step back. If there's anything she knows about Lightning from all these days she's traversed Mirage Sandsea with her, it's that she's easy to enrage. She looks down, away from eyes she imagines have sparked with that familiar intensity she's come to know and fear, that same intensity that could erupt from the smallest of mutual conversations with her to the most lethal of clashes with Chaos's forces.
A quicksilver sigh is all she hears before she feels icy fingertips take hold of her wrist, followed by the feeling of her fingers being curled around a foreign, strangely freezing hilt. Oddly, it is not another thing that weighs her down. Instead, the feeling gets her to look at the curved, rusty dagger for a split second, gets her to face Lightning again after that. Something in her mind or heart or all of the above quells whatever heavy feeling there was in her gut, whatever negative emotion was plaguing her to no end.
"Keep that," Lightning says, eyes dull and unsparked and not intense. "Should come in handy since your powers get out of hand sometimes."
Terra just clutches the dagger to her chest, takes her point without any protest. And for just a moment, she thinks she's seeing something softer or delicate in Lightning's eyes. Lightning turns away to face the ink-black night, and Terra can only just be left in thought.
Is... is that what love is?
III - Miracles
Lightning once believed in miracles all the time. Divine intervention. The sweet, beautiful wishes that come when a pathetic sorry ass needs them the most.
She's seen miracles with her own two eyes, too many times to count. So much so, that she's learned to see past what they may affirm themselves to be.
Glorious, stupid bullshit, they are.
The sand yawns, and dust knives its way through the cape resting around her rigid shoulder. Ripped and ever-stained, the fabric bellows. It reminds her, again, of the wills of the wretched desert. Of the hollow promises that, if she ever finishes enduring the damned seas of sand, that she will be free from the chains of its wrath for good.
Curls of rose hair splash against her finely-framed yet soot-marked face. Her philtrum scrunches up in annoyance as dust waddles in and around her nose. She keeps moving. This crevice has something at the end, she knows; something that can reward her for lasting this long in the crappy heat. Whether it's somehow home or supplies or something better than passing through narrow, craggy walls. And it'll damn well be worth it, she knows right now.
Even if it's fucking manikins.
She wonders why that, even if she knows miracles and fairytales can lie, that she finds herself trusting them. Why it's that something so possibly empty and possibly conniving and possibly traitorous can soothe her to her very core; why it's that her nose settles down even as the dead sand drifts through her nostrils, filling her head with promises that can be true or false or somehow both.
Uncertainty leaves icy eyes floundering, once hard and true strides wavering and tired. It reaches her mind, her mantra. She expels a sigh, shakes her head, rubs blistered fingers over the cold and familiar necklace on her chest as she digs her free hand into the wall of a boulder that covers her path. For reasons beyond her comprehension, it's this cold feeling that always rebalances her when she thinks she's lost and unsure.
Despite her actions, her mind betrays them. I don't fucking know, she thinks out of boiling exasperation. I won't ever know.