#((may continues to write abstract dream symbolism level bullshit and disguise it as a meta | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bonmotx · 1 year

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□□□ Record

In his travels, one of the most horrific sights was labelled beautiful. The skies were filled with little pieces of bone and blood, fluttering about like a butterfly's wings. Delicate, almost tangible.

Perhaps it would be easier to dismiss as a memory if they did not slow his steps as real as anything.

The brush against his cheek shows it is truly there. How horrifyingly familiar.

People sit on picnic blankets as blue as the rose petals, tucked into his joints to disguise the creaking sound. It is almost a whimper that pierces the air. Soft fabric persists even as he walks forward.

Footsteps are gentle. Gentle. Like the fabric. Like the fingers that grab at his cloak. Pin it to his armor. Guide and steady him forward.

(They used to be so much larger than him. A palm that could blind him in one handful. Now, they feel so small. Even two clasped hands could not fully cover his eyes.)

They still grab and pull. Now, they pull at petals like a game of forget-me-love-me-nots.

(Were they so? Perhaps love was made in knotted threads, instead, like spoken here. Then was he loved by what bound him? Did it love him as it strangled him?)

The iron stings at his skin. Still, he hammers the nails in. Otherwise, it might fall off. Further. Another step. His boot sinks past the petals that are pierced as easily as the flesh beneath the roots, as the nail buries into the shoulder to keep the armor on.

When did he take it in hand? That's a silly question. The color of blood and of these reminders are the very same.

The flowers smother the lips they are pressed into. There is no need to cry for help when you cannot be heard. A tree that falls to time's axe has no need to make a noise as it dies.

(It was nothing so cruel. A hand can sting as much as a cut. Always so gentle. Always so.)

He tries to breathe. They're petals. Yet petals are still organs and skin. This understanding stains the retina in the color of the sky above. The ground is covered in what cannot be imagined. Death persists and coats the surface in all this.

The hill is covered in death.

An itchy memory scratches at his eyes, feels even more irritated as his eyelashes flutter and tease salt into where the skin is raw and scratched. The pain is as uncountable as the bodies on the hill. Something as cold as the sky strangles and swells as the buds on the trees and a broken limb.

All will be unable to be reached with the final nail. The iron holds him together, together, even as it creaks louder and louder. Hands try to pry out that which holds him together. Try to rip everything away. Naive, thinking that putting a stopper to the pain would heal when it is only the pain that pushes him forward and keeps him whole at all.

A deserved punishment. A balm to the senses.

(If he died, would she not patch his wounds so gently still?)

It aches. One final swing, final step, and his feet escape the hill’s grasp.

The fingers finally stop pulling. Something breaks free. The petal that lands before him is soaked through in blue. All sways with the color of the sky.

That's how the world has shaped him. It all fades to a dye of blue. Woad leaves are boiled to slaughter for a pretty cloak. How fitting to the fate of all.

Madder and indigo are not so different so.

(If he tried to-)

No matter the original color, it all becomes blue in the end. Blue as death, as lips, as freezing fingers, as a kingly glance, as the eyes in his head, unpluckable, unlike the petals so surrounding, unlike skin.

How ill-fitting. He wishes he could carve baby-blue out, yet the sky carries with him even in his gaze.

He breathes- yet finds he cannot. Her hands are finally clasped tight around something adjacent to the shoulders, leading up to the brain and depriving of oxygen, blue, blue, blue.

He cannot find himself to be surprised.

(It always hurts. He is ever out of breath, ever unable to blink himself awake.)

This is fine. All is fine. Another place will be found. What has been dyed a deeper hue cannot go back to what it used to be. A corpse still breathing cannot be set to a grave.

So: it is fine. It must be. It will be. There is no other choice. There is no other path.

The world aches. Skin falls. How much something so simple must ache, despite its life. Doomed to die over and over, if it wishes to remain the same. In another place, the lamb sleeps naïve as it is appraised for the worth of its tender sweet meat. Similarly blooming, the flower, unthinking, hopes not. Lost to it is something like living long.

The wanderer might have hoped upon a younger day he never sees that horrific, strangled tree again. Yet now, he knows it is useless to bother: useless as breath to a corpse hanging from the tree. It sways like the petals in the air, and both fade to dust in the time between a heartbeat and the next. Inescapable as fact.

That which is pink and full of life will always die under the weight of the blue sky.

He knows, for he was once another color, a forgotten hue, once upon some lost day before the crown was set.

#arthur ic.#arthur headcanon.#meta.#suicidal ideation tw #gore tw #(includes eyes nails and general bloody imagery)#implied parental neglect tw #queue.#((as always dead dove do not eat and biased and unreliable narrators #((may continues to write abstract dream symbolism level bullshit and disguise it as a meta

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