Hollow - Sebastian Sallow
Summary: It's been two years since you died. Two years since you'd jumped in front of Solomon and changed the trajectory of Sebastian's life forever. His hatred for himself knew no bounds, and no matter how much time passed, he knew he would never be able to forgive himself.
Word Count: 840
Warnings: Graphic descriptions of blood/violence, references to depression
A super short stand-alone drabble of pure pain because why not. It's here on Ao3 too :'))
Sebastian was drowning.
His mind was a never-ending sea of grief, anger, and despair– choking him all hours of the day and threatening to suck him under every waking minute of his wretched life. He was always angry, fuming with the kind of rage that stirred hot and deep inside of him and burned anyone that got too close. He existed in a perpetual state of self-loathing that not even Ominis could pull him from, and it was no wonder why.
The only person that could ever talk Sebastian down from shitty feelings like these was gone. At his own hands, no less.
The same hands that had protected, soothed, and treasured you from the moment he met you, had taken you from this world in a split second. Another resulting tragedy of his visceral, untamable temper. It didn’t matter that he’d been aiming for Solomon, or that his intent behind the killing curse hadn’t even been directed at you at all. In the end, you had jumped in the way to stop him, and the green cords of the unforgivable curse had wrapped around you and forced your last breath from your lungs all the same.
His hands used to fit perfectly with yours.
He couldn’t fathom that so much time had passed already without you beside him. Two years ago to the fucking day. Seven-hundred and thirty days of unimaginable agony, to be exact.
On the one year anniversary of your death, Ominis had found him shut away in the Undercroft screaming bloody murder, setting every last barrel and crate ablaze with the force of the damn sun. There had been no getting through to the brunet then, and there certainly wouldn’t be this year either– seeing as Sebastian had taken his anger off of the school grounds entirely to fan the flames of fury that burned bright behind his dark, hollow eyes.
Sebastian clenched his bloodied fists and stared down at the mutilated corpses he’d been standing over for a while now. The Forbidden Forest was void of any light, save for a few strands of moonlight that broke through the canopy overhead, casting a dim glow on the mess before him. Hot tears swam in his eyes and blurred the horror scene that painted the ground, and his throat struggled to swallow the all encompassing thought that you weren’t here.
A sob heaved from Sebastian’s chest as he fell to his knees, pummeling the shit out of one of the already dead, messy lumps he’d been using as a punching bag. His wand was somewhere in the grass beside him, but he didn’t need it. Not for this.
No one was there to stop him, and he was almost glad for it.
Until he remembered that no one was there to stop him.
Sebastian screamed, shredding his already torn up throat further as he punched and kicked the bloody heap until the tears finally started to fall down his freckled face. His fists sank deeper and deeper into the pale, marred flesh of the dead Ashwinder, the body cold and unmoving, and the foul coppery stench of blood was like a distant memory burned into his nostrils.
The gaps between his fingers were too wide; your fingers used to fit there perfectly.
Sebastian felt a bone within the corpse crack under the force of his punches. He couldn’t breathe.
Cold blood met with cold hands, and Sebastian swore there used to be life in his extremities. It wasn’t enough, he decided, almost desperate to unleash the boiling rage inside of him; all of the frustration and hopelessness, every last lick of anguish and pain.
He stared at his hands. The spaces between his fingers were like gaping voids, sucking in the tiny remnants of joy the world had left him with. His legs trembled and gave out from under him, his knees collapsing against the lifeless body beneath him and soaking his trousers with even more blood. It was a non-issue compared to the massive rifts that tore open in his psyche. Sebastian shifted and let himself roll to the side, the ground meeting his back with a thud, and the world spun for just a while longer while he blinked up at the thin strips of light that snuck through the branches overhead.
The sight reminded him of how much you’d loved astronomy. You used to drag him all over school to stargaze for hours.
Sebastian couldn’t stop himself from reaching out, his dirty fingers spreading and grasping uselessly at empty air. He stared at the darkening sky, short gasps punctuating wordless sobs as more tears than he’d ever produced before rolled down the sides of his face and into his ears, moistening his hair.
The Slytherin stayed that way for hours, digging his fingers into the grass to try and fill the aching chasm in his chest. It was the last time Sebastian ever let himself cry.
His fingers never stopped spreading, and his hands never stopped searching. But they never found anything, either.
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Imagine Cody having nightmares of memories he can’t remember. The chip has blocked what and who is in the dreams. But Cody suffers through them almost every night and wakes up with this sense of utter loss. He can’t remember who he lost but he knows they’re everything to him.
But then then chip is removed and all the memories of Order 66 come back. The wave of devastation that hits Cody is too much to handle and he falls to his knees. Because he simply followed orders like a good soldier and had to kill Obi Wan. And he almost wishes for the chip back, so he would have to feel his heart shattering in a million pieces over the loss of Obi Wan.
But Rex takes his hand and pull Cody to his feet and simply states: “The General is still out there and we’re going to find him.”
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Ok but like I NEED to know for SURE who the person in the Nikeya epilogue is. I know what is implied, but I absolutely NEED to hear it, to have it confirmed 100%. And if it is who I think it is then I have to deal with another heartbreak because...
In the Priory of the Orange Tree, it is mentioned that the current Warlord of Seiiki is DIRECTLY descended from the first Warlord (Nikeya) which means she had to marry and have a child. But with the implications that Dumai still lived this just hurts me more about the decisions they had to make.
I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS AND I NEED TO KNOW HOW NIKEYA'S STORY CONTINUES.
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A thing I keep coming back to when thinking about Calamity is how, in another story, Zerxus and Laerryn would have been heros. Like we talk about villain-coding our characters but in some cases that can be so dependant on what the in-story environment is and also what genre they exist in.
Zerxus, especially-- I feel like in young adult fiction and nineties/2000s sci-fi movies, the whole point of the narreative was demonstrating that large systems/institutions cannot be trusted, especially those that provide you with one narrative that you're meant to adopt as your history and is meant to inform your entire belief system. If Zerxus had done exactly what he'd done in a dystopian novel/movie, listened to someone who society told him was bad, didn't fully trust him but gave him an opportunity? He'd be the change agent that revealed the dark truths of his society and we'd all be cheering for him.
Laerryn I would not call a hero in a different context, but I also have a hard time reading her as a villain even within the canon (but I'm biased). What I will say, is do we all remember that Star Trek (or similar space opera show of your choice) episode where the secret project that somebody was working on saved the day? Or countless pieces of media where acting instantly and thoughtlessly to save someone you care about is romanticized? Yeah.
Anyway, disclaimers, this is purely my own reading of the text, I'm probably wrong, I am not in any way saying that what they did didn't have horrific consequences. I am just saying that if we scooped up at least half of the Calamity gang and plunked them down in a different genre and they took the same actions, they'd be the good guys without question.
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