Beyond the Stars

Prolouge: Before Now

In a pit of his own grief, the lonely red paladin laid in his room sprawled out among his sheets. He was in nothing but his boxers, and his room was painfully cold, yet sweat had still managed to collect on his brow. To say it homed only on his eyebrows would be a major miscalculation, because his face gleamed of the salty liquid. How someone could sweat so much while doing nothing was beyond proper reasoning.

But he had more pressing matters to attend to.

Trying to decipher the difference between sweat and tears was not one of them, but it did help to pass the time. Because really, if your sweat has no odor then how would you go about differentiating the two substances? They're both typically salty; they just exit differently.

Truly it was a dumb thing to think about, but it helped busy his mind. Something else to ponder, or add to his shit list was his hair. He had the ghost of a mullet that's now just a mess of split ends, and was well below shoulder length. It wrapped around his head in a mess of oily tangles. Some of his hair stuck to his shiny forehead, glistening from his obsessive sweating.

Fixing this problem would be easy 'cause all he had to do was cut it and wash it. That was something he had plenty of experience with, for he had been cutting his hair since he was very little. Something he had made his own ever since Shiro had taught him. Even so, he just saw it as another thing he had no energy to do.

It also made the thoughts he wanted to avoid the most present.

But they were no match for the uproar in his stomach, yearning for food but never being released of its eternal hunger. He didn't remember the last time he ate, his stubborn resilience had blinded him and turned his hunger into a faraway facade. He knew it was there, but still, he chose to ignore it even when it chased him day and night.

Alas, with all this running he'd been doing, or rather lack of movement, had left his body numb. Quite literally, as a soft tingling sensation had found its way all about his figure. Exhausted from lack of sleep his body had acted faster than his brain. There seemed to be more and more to add to his shit list the more his mind seemed to wonder.

Yet, nothing was able to keep him from circling back to the thing that hurt him the most. No matter how much he attempted to avoid it; it'd always find a way to claw its way back into his mind. It. That was the proper term to refer to it as, for it was but a creature; a vile, disgusting, horrid abomination.

So why did he let his guard down? Why did he not only trust it, but also find solace and companionship in it. How could he possibly believe that thing was the person he loved the most?

And how was it possible to lose him twice?