‘so many dreams were broken and so much was sacrificed.’ [ @ author!abigail! ]

{ The Heart Of Everything } 

Her heart is still racing in her chest, the violence of the moment rendering her immobile in all but the pounding behind her breast, as if her heart were a bird trapped in a cage, desperate to escape the cat perched upon the sofa. Red stains the pages of her work, bleeding the ink and drowning demons in it’s wake, an eerie and poetic sight in the face of the one her words had summoned. 

She hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs – hadn’t heard the door open, either. When the ink fell from her quill so readily, the words forming faster than she could pen them down, the whole world shut itself off. She lost track of where she was, of who she was with – and today, she lost track of reality itself. 

It hadn’t been Captain Flint that entered her room – nor had it been James McGraw. When she heard his voice, she’d gotten up so fast she’d knocked over the wine – forgotten from dinner – and contronted Redbeard without thought. He was so alive in her mind, in that moment, that who else could it have possibly been? 

Now, as the world came back to her, she found herself at a loss. His words were profoundly painful, in the light of her story – but in the shadows of the day they held deeper and more personal meaning. She took a shuddering breath, and after a moment of regaining herself, she thought back on what she had asked her character. 

“What would you say to her if you could?”

She took another breath, closing her eyes and willing her heart to slow down, to beat in silence rather than raise all this painful noise in her chest. Opening them, she faced him again – all of him. The man who lost her – the demon who walked beside her – the character who lived with her only in the stories fashioned by a young woman who had barely known any of them. The man, the demon, or the woman. 

Lifting her chin, she addressed them all, on behalf of herself only for the fact she could not bring voice to a dead woman without a pen, and would not dare to try even if she could. 

“How long will you focus on what you lost, in pursuit of what you now have?” She stepped forward, beseeching his pain, and bidding him to let it go before it consumed him in ways not even Thomas could heal. “When will you say, I won’t lose what I have, instead of, look what I lost to get it?”