The Keepers' Evil

Twenty: I wont let her suffer

Song- Achilles come down: Gang of youths

Trigger warning for major descriptions of abuse, torture, death, blood, child abuse.

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"I won't let her suffer!"

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Madeleine was gentle. She was also kind, beautiful, and incredibly intelligent, but she was gentle foremost. I had never noticed just how much so until I watched her from afar, and saw sunshine in the darkest of Common Rooms. The fingertips that tucked her dark strands of wild hair behind her ear were soft, like even the littlest of actions took care and attention. The coy smile that dispersed across her cheeks was a delicate shyness, as if the sun that beamed from behind the clouds allowed all of us to warm under the mellow light it radiated, and her laugh was especially equable, serene enough to calm years of times lost to trauma.

But her eyes were guarded, as though her gentle petals within were being blown too harshly in storms too strenuous to survive. I saw the sharp thorns that prickled over her gentleness as her eyes found mine, and as her smile faded into a darkness that looked too steep on a girl so bright, I noticed one of her petals fall from the sharp stem.

Flowers and storms don't survive in the same existence, because the petals will always try and catch too many raindrops, and the flower will always drown in the heaviness. But the storm persists, as in its nature to do so, and the rain it created will always make more of the same flowers grow. But they will never be that one, the one that tried to hold onto the rain too many times, it will never be that one gentle flower.

Understanding Madeleine's past had me walking on a tightrope over a chasm of lost beings, it was struggling through a perseverance knowing that at the end of the tightrope, I would still look to the depths below and see people I didn't want to see, people I couldn't save, love that I couldn't retrieve. Loving Madeleine was an immortal repetition of walking on the edge of a sword, but she stood on the sharp end whilst I stood on the blunt, and no matter how hard I tried to switch places with her, to let her stand where blood didn't follow, there wasn't enough space, the sword's edge was far too thin for us both to move past each other.

Madeleine's eyes stayed connected to mine for a moment too short, and the people inside of us that were tirelessly working to retrieve our thread and make it whole, finally connected their hands, they finally found the middle where the thread's knot truly bound us together and for a second, it felt like coming home.

But a second was a powerful measure of time, it held the strength to feel like forever in the hands of the right person, but a second more was all it took for her to let go.

Madeleine didn't need to be saved, she didn't need the thread to save her from drowning in the rain. Her feet didn't need the relief of the blunt end of the sword, because they had already been cut enough to feel numb, and the flowers within her were shielded by the canopies of trees around her. Madeleine didn't need to be saved, but I did, and saving her meant saving me.

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Not a word was spoken to The Keepers, not a word was needed, the betrayal I felt every time I saw them wrote a letter to parts of my mind that used to light when I saw Madeleine, when I saw pieces of happiness in myself, and it told them to stay dark, it told them that I was losing myself and her along with it.