Twenty-Eight: Let's focus on what you're after

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Song- doomsday: Lizzy McAlpine

"Let's focus on what you're after."

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The moon didn't seem to mind my company. Its light held my eyes in an embrace that didn't care to place me in the courts of the universe, to judge my actions as sins and my love as a waste. My pupils could notice the tiny flecks in the moon's surface from a distance too far to really know, and it healed a part of the night's cold loneliness.

The rounded windows held curved alcoves, ones that overlooked the canopies of trees as though we were above it all. As children, Anne and I had curled into the alcoves only to fall asleep along the wooden frames and Our parents always made sure we woke up in our beds. Though it was a strange feeling to suddenly fit along the ledge that I had only fit a tiny part of before, I could only wish that sleep held me as closely as it had done when I was little.

"What's your plan, Seb?" Madeleine's figure coiled into the window's beam that Anne had always occupied, her eyes watching me with an intensity that burned the moonlight away from its soothing cast. She held her knees to her chest, the flurry of black robes hanging from the shelf around her. Madeleine blinked almost furiously as she silently watched my mind scrabble and my hands fidget with the sleeves of my jumper, tucking her hands innocently into her own.

"I don't know, Maddie, this is all too much. It's all far too much." I could feel the agonising sting of defeat creep into view, the curse giving me the choice to forfeit Madeleine to the devil. Too many questions remained unanswered, there was too much danger that came with the unknown.

"Nobody can save me from in this house." She whispered lowly as though others could hear her, pressing her finger gently to her lips like she wasn't just a figment of the torture in my head. I knew that by keeping my eyes tucked within hers that I was fiddling with the game my mind was playing with me, but I needed to hold her somehow, for her to look at me just one more time.

I cast my legs away from the window, refusing to think, to breathe, until I reached her. It didn't matter how she got back to me, it didn't matter how many people had to die before I got to her, it mattered that she was free of the plagues that sickened her psyche. There was no plan, no figure of a solution, but a piece of the puzzle did sit in the pocket of my father's old suit.

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"What are you going to do, just sneak out?" Madeleine trailed behind me, catching her shoes on the heels of mine, as she traipsed herself through the house like the sudden good angel on my shoulder. Lumos lit my wand through the darkened corridors, the shadows refusing to lurk whilst I triumphed the emptiness as a figure of my father.

"Apparently so. I better get a huge fucking thank you when I get you back here-" change was noticeable in the house, even in the darkest of corridors. My words failed to piece together upon the sight of two frames that laced the wall before the front door. Their frames were leafed in gold sculptures, a rather elegant design that Anne had undoubtedly fixated on. The frames held together the slicks of paint that forged the bittersweet faces of my parents.

I stopped before them, frozen with their eyes held in mine, their faces permanently fixed with smiles that lit a candle inside of the part of me that had stowed them away. I hadn't missed them, but rather felt an indescribably painful break in the child that I had been. I had thought it odd to not feel the heaviness of missing them, but maybe it was because I hadn't healed enough to miss them, I didn't know how to miss them.

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