Chapter Text
i.
The birds are all identical to one another, and they are everywhere. At every corner, at every window, at every dark and quiet place one might have tarried... he is hardly able to forget: so long as he walks in this sweet dream, you'll never be alone.
After these many years spent steeped in that fact,
He 'feels' about it the same way that water tastes.
ii.
March 7th has fallen asleep, and cannot be roused.
There is a time in which he and Black Swan are alone together beside March's sickbed. He had thought himself alone when he entered, haunted by a feeling that he was— wasn't doing enough, there was surely something, some way he could reach her mind,
he had rested his gloved fingertips against the ice,
And Black Swan had said, "I wouldn't go in there, if I were you."
He didn't move. But a small frown fixed on his face.
"She's… feeling very many things, right now, isn't she. Almost too quickly for me to even perceive their passage."
"To an outside perspective, yes, it certainly seems that way." She gives a lingering look to the door. "But we won't have much time to ponder that, for now…"
Sunday can hear the distinctive thud of Mr. Yang's cane on carpet.
Soon they are ready to leave for the Herta Space Station.
iii.
It's the first time he's used the Space Anchor. He has little time to ponder and catalogue its idiosyncrasies, however, because they come to not in a vibrant research center, but something that feels much closer to a deserted, haunted derelict. What should be a purposeful stride turns sideways; a careful, creeping walk.
The strange licorice scent of an injured child of the Swarm is something he has only dreamed, before today. That poor girl's lingering memory,
her haunted, shed shell, locked down in the fetid dark,
had captured it, perfectly.
"You were a great help," Mr. Yang tells him. "But I'm a bit worried about what might happen if we were separated… stay close."
A trust he has yet to earn, Sunday thinks. But the flavor of the lack is not in suspicion. It's care.
iv.
It is so much easier to be just a melody in strains on the wind.
After the crux of the crisis of Amphoreus, that image of gently waving fields of wheat remains… a new favorite. Sunday meditates on it frequently. He had relaxed into the bodilessness, playing over their sway to keep a sense of even rhythm as March had her heart-to-heart with Evernight. Tempo or system tick, pacing was important. Some things cannot be hurried. Especially when they have abided, already, for long years in the dark.
v.
At times,
his own, recognizably his, thoughts
are trickling out from the edges of all the rest;
like dream syrup, sticky, viscous, full of blending hues
full of old and lingering things that mismatch this high-contrast onslaught;
what he had promised he could handle, forever,
what he had only handled before with gloves, at a far
and teetering
remove.
wishes and WISHES and hurts and HURTS and I want and can't have and could have, would have,
will they won't they won't we can't i GIVE me—
He runs his fingers over his cheekbones hoping to catch the seam of a mask he has already removed, and yet cannot remove. To become Supplicant is instant, no take-backsies, and unsuppressible, after all.
vi.
The birds are all identical to one another,
and they wander, Sunday's eye set into their chest, everywhere.