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Nov. 13th, 2011 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
witticaster"Oh, my son," the Dolorosa murmurs, the sound of the words never escaping her throat. Only the shape of the words appear, her mouth forming silent pleas now that the crowd has dissipated in search of more tortures to witness. (When others were here, jeering at her own boy's screams, her jaw was locked in place. She could hardly breathe, could hardly hear the low, pained growl echoing from the chest of the Disciple at her side.)
She smooths back the dark locks of hair that lie limply on his brow, his skin slick with sweat and blood beneath her fingertips. What little she has eaten that day lurches in her stomach.
In death, his face is eased of some of the tensions these final days brought him. He knew more than he would say, even when he was asked outright; she is quite certain that a mother knows these things. Since she first cradled him against her, her sleeves concealing him to all the world as she spirited him from an early grave, she has--she cannot bring herself to recall that it is now a matter of 'had'--spent perhaps a month away from him in total. Perhaps two. He could hide nothing from her, particularly not when he knew he must. She recalls each petty illness, each handmade gift, and the paucity of moments when she could not make an educated guess as to what he was doing.
He was as nothing she--or any other troll, for that matter--had even seen before, but even he had his habits. His ways. His preferences. And she has known them all, at least by shadowy outline: of his inner thoughts, the things he did manage to hide from all who knew him, she could not speak, but she could sense where that private counsel lay, where he chose to trouble no one but his own self.
The grimace of his mouth is not gone, his lower lip lacerated; his mouth contains four or five bloody little holes where he first bit down rather than cry out in pain and fear and fury. But the tension of his eyebrows and their perpetual frown has abated, and his body might be mistaken for a pile of rags gathered in her arms.
The Dolorosa examines him as carefully as when he had only a few sweeps and a pair of skinned palms in his possession, heedless of the Psiioniic and the Disciple flanking her. The whole of Alternia has been eclipsed by the broken form of the troll before her. She brushes back his unruly hair once more, her hand sliding down to cup his cheek for a moment before she turns her gaze to the rest of him.
He is a map of mottled, dark bruises tending towards red across his chest and upper arms. And then there are the arrow wounds, the arrows themselves pulled out by the Disciple, whose mewling sobs have only recently quieted, after the Psiioniic fetched down the body. They are naked punctures now, narrow gashes ringed in his quickly drying blood, a red with a vibrancy that doesn't fade and an overwhelming metallic scent that taints every breath she takes.
The Dolorosa forces herself to look at his arms, bare of the manacles by which he'd been hoisted, his feet a hair's breadth from solid ground. Though the Psiioniic left the manacles where they hung, her son's wrists bear their indelible mark. His flesh is burnt away, leaving blackened edges of skin and a sliver of something pearlescent that she tells herself is not his endoskeleton. Where the chains flared with heat, his body gave way; where their unfiled edges chafed, he bled. Where neither arrowheads nor irons had plagued him, the long, thin cuts of the scourge splayed across his corpse like lacework.
Were she to lay a hand upon his body, to cradle him in one arm as though he were yet a flailing grub and to lay her palm upon his calf or his chest, she would feel his blood beneath her skin. She cannot touch him without finding a weal under her fingers. He is more injury than whole, silent and still as she has never known him, and he grows colder each moment she holds him to her chest.
Only when she sees the watery droplets of green on his neck, sliding down toward his chest, does she realize that she is weeping. Her breath hitches, shuddering through her as she lets go the sobs she'd swallowed all day. He must see her strong, she had told herself, must not have more cause to fear if he meets her eyes. (The one moment he did, his eyes softened from their rage and pain into all the fear and worry she saw in him when he was small, upon waking from a nightmare. She had dug her nails into her palms until she had control once more over the urge to run forward and cut him down with her own saw.)
She gasps for air as she wails for her son, crying between keening sobs, "Would--Would That I Had Died For You. Would That You Lived." It is messy and undignified, her tears mingling with his blood as she presses his cheek, and she does not care.
Distantly, she feels a hand on her shoulder, too broad and dull-nailed to be the Disciple. She ignores the Psiioniic even when he leans in close enough to ask, "doloro2a?"
She could not give her boy what he had wanted most in the world, however much he had longed, however much he had worked. She could not bring him his revolution like so many flowers, could not bend the world around them until it would love and cherish him as she had. She could not keep him safe from harm nor free from death's heavy toll.
The Dolorosa kisses his face, heedless of the taste of blood on her lips. "Oh, My Son, My Son."
She smooths back the dark locks of hair that lie limply on his brow, his skin slick with sweat and blood beneath her fingertips. What little she has eaten that day lurches in her stomach.
In death, his face is eased of some of the tensions these final days brought him. He knew more than he would say, even when he was asked outright; she is quite certain that a mother knows these things. Since she first cradled him against her, her sleeves concealing him to all the world as she spirited him from an early grave, she has--she cannot bring herself to recall that it is now a matter of 'had'--spent perhaps a month away from him in total. Perhaps two. He could hide nothing from her, particularly not when he knew he must. She recalls each petty illness, each handmade gift, and the paucity of moments when she could not make an educated guess as to what he was doing.
He was as nothing she--or any other troll, for that matter--had even seen before, but even he had his habits. His ways. His preferences. And she has known them all, at least by shadowy outline: of his inner thoughts, the things he did manage to hide from all who knew him, she could not speak, but she could sense where that private counsel lay, where he chose to trouble no one but his own self.
The grimace of his mouth is not gone, his lower lip lacerated; his mouth contains four or five bloody little holes where he first bit down rather than cry out in pain and fear and fury. But the tension of his eyebrows and their perpetual frown has abated, and his body might be mistaken for a pile of rags gathered in her arms.
The Dolorosa examines him as carefully as when he had only a few sweeps and a pair of skinned palms in his possession, heedless of the Psiioniic and the Disciple flanking her. The whole of Alternia has been eclipsed by the broken form of the troll before her. She brushes back his unruly hair once more, her hand sliding down to cup his cheek for a moment before she turns her gaze to the rest of him.
He is a map of mottled, dark bruises tending towards red across his chest and upper arms. And then there are the arrow wounds, the arrows themselves pulled out by the Disciple, whose mewling sobs have only recently quieted, after the Psiioniic fetched down the body. They are naked punctures now, narrow gashes ringed in his quickly drying blood, a red with a vibrancy that doesn't fade and an overwhelming metallic scent that taints every breath she takes.
The Dolorosa forces herself to look at his arms, bare of the manacles by which he'd been hoisted, his feet a hair's breadth from solid ground. Though the Psiioniic left the manacles where they hung, her son's wrists bear their indelible mark. His flesh is burnt away, leaving blackened edges of skin and a sliver of something pearlescent that she tells herself is not his endoskeleton. Where the chains flared with heat, his body gave way; where their unfiled edges chafed, he bled. Where neither arrowheads nor irons had plagued him, the long, thin cuts of the scourge splayed across his corpse like lacework.
Were she to lay a hand upon his body, to cradle him in one arm as though he were yet a flailing grub and to lay her palm upon his calf or his chest, she would feel his blood beneath her skin. She cannot touch him without finding a weal under her fingers. He is more injury than whole, silent and still as she has never known him, and he grows colder each moment she holds him to her chest.
Only when she sees the watery droplets of green on his neck, sliding down toward his chest, does she realize that she is weeping. Her breath hitches, shuddering through her as she lets go the sobs she'd swallowed all day. He must see her strong, she had told herself, must not have more cause to fear if he meets her eyes. (The one moment he did, his eyes softened from their rage and pain into all the fear and worry she saw in him when he was small, upon waking from a nightmare. She had dug her nails into her palms until she had control once more over the urge to run forward and cut him down with her own saw.)
She gasps for air as she wails for her son, crying between keening sobs, "Would--Would That I Had Died For You. Would That You Lived." It is messy and undignified, her tears mingling with his blood as she presses his cheek, and she does not care.
Distantly, she feels a hand on her shoulder, too broad and dull-nailed to be the Disciple. She ignores the Psiioniic even when he leans in close enough to ask, "doloro2a?"
She could not give her boy what he had wanted most in the world, however much he had longed, however much he had worked. She could not bring him his revolution like so many flowers, could not bend the world around them until it would love and cherish him as she had. She could not keep him safe from harm nor free from death's heavy toll.
The Dolorosa kisses his face, heedless of the taste of blood on her lips. "Oh, My Son, My Son."