Heavy is the Head that Wears the Solemn Crown

Twenty-Five - Beauty and the Ashes

Tommy

Conscious returns and deserts him in dimly remembered cycles. Fuzziness drags his muscles to the ground, and pain forces noises from his trembling lips. His back has been lit on fire, the smoldering flames melting his skin and searing the flesh beneath. The rest of his limbs have been covered with ice, frost digging into his skin and slowing down his blood. His head feels like he's been dunked in a tub of water, left with his mouth and nose beneath the churning waves. His breathing is pathetic, a stinging pain in his lungs that makes him wish he was dead instead of alive. He's barely holding his mental state together. He's faintly aware of his own thoughts, his mind scrambling to take in surface-level details of the world around him.

He hears someone talking. Although he can't determine what the words are exactly, he knows it's a female voice. The closest emotion he can associate with her tone is worry. She's terrified of something. Sometimes, a noise she makes will coincide with a pressure enclosed over his hand. He can't even tell who she is, but he hopes that whatever is scaring her will go away. He doesn't like listening to her fear. It reminds him of something foggy that lies just past his mental barriers, and he doesn't want anything to do with the faded colors and sounds that appear beyond the thick wall of self-preservation.

He can see a brunette racing in and out of his blurry vision. The brunette leans down to him with a dark red rag in their hand. He mutters sometimes, but just like with the female, he can't tell what the brunette is saying. All he knows is that the brunette is desperately trying to clean something off. Considering there's sometimes a cool weight pressed against his burning back, he assumes that the brunette is using the rag on him. He wonders why. A rag isn't going to be able to put out a fire. They should just put him in water. He would rather drown than experience this pain.

There's one more person there with him. He can sometimes tell that his head is slightly elevated and that there's something warm messing with his hair. He tilts his head up to see the face of someone with rivulet colored eyes. Those eyes were sometimes looking down at him, and other times, they were staring up at the world around the person those eyes belonged to. As one of the few things he could focus on that didn't hurt, he found himself staring into those eyes quite often. He tried to discern the emotions showing through the window to the soul, but no amount of effort was making it easier.

He doesn't know how long he was in this state. The pain was so overwhelming that he hardly had time to think. He couldn't exactly count the seconds or determine the position of the celestial bodies. He didn't even want to think about something as fickle as time when he knew that death was clinging to his limbs, trying to drag him into an early grave. He was tempted to give in to the angels of the goddess, but something was keeping him where he laid. The angels, beings of shadows, disliked the fiery wings that sometimes appeared within his field of vision. He subconsciously reached for them a lot, feeling the warm flames dance across his fingertips. They made him feel better, drawing him farther away from the light at the end of the tunnel.

Eventually, he opened his eyes. He couldn't open them all the way, the sunlight hurt his retinas too much, but what he could see from his squint started to make sense in his mind. That was a tree. Bark covered the trunk. Leaves grew from the branches. Grass and rocks lay beneath the tree. He lay on top of the grass and rocks, underneath the branches. He was not alone. There were four people around him. In front of him, directly overhead, Andor sat, his head in Andor's lap. At his side, clutching his hand tightly, Beau was staring intently at him. Freddie and a pirate with pale white hair were standing at his feet. Freddie looked worried and the pirate looked apathetic. Every single person seemed to be exhausted. He, too, felt the exhaustion stirring in his body. Part of him wanted to continue sleeping, but a bigger part of him demanded he stay awake.