A Ballad of Snakes and Shadows // A Dark Sebastian Sallow Romance

Chapter Thirty Six: Mercy

(TW: SUICIDAL THOUGHTS, IDEATIONS, DIALOGUE, REQUESTS. PLEASE TAKE CARE IN READING.)

There wouldn't be any sleep for me tonight. Not after everything had gone so wrong.

My own failings were loud enough that they would forever ring in my ears and nothing would be able to silence them. They would keep me awake at night, just as the ones of my nightmares that served only one purpose.

To remind me of how foolish and utterly weak I was, no matter how high I tried to build myself. The image of myself that I'd worked so hard to rebuild, piece by piece had been shattered.

And someone else had paid the price for my own hubris.

Natty had warned me, she had known this was doomed from the start... she had been so fucking right.

How did we get here?

I knew that it was solely on me for what happened with the antidote. I had been so sure of myself, so sure that it could've worked despite my own apprehensiveness. My quest to cure her had clouded all of my judgment, it had blocked out any semblance of good thought completely.

I wished that I had never had to create something like that in the first place.

If the Court had not come for Poppy, we wouldn't have gotten here.

If it hadn't been for Sebastian Sallow and all of his meddling schemes, Poppy would never have had to know the torture that had been inflicted on her these past several months.

She'd be alive, she'd be happy. She would've been here, with me.

If it hadn't been for Sebastian and his lust to make me pay for his incarceration, or betrayal or hurt, or whatever he wanted to call it or pin it on - Poppy would be here.

I was a fool for believing I could see something in him that wasn't just evil or malicious self servance. There was no way to see the devil as something he wasn't.

Fallen angel or not, there was only hatred left in his heart. In that dark heart there was only a deep yearning. The kind that was meant for the one who swatted him directly out of heaven. He'd burn his fellow angels until they'd been burned to ashes, and he'd sprinkle them across the earth.

They'd be so unrecognizable by the time he damned them, that there would be nothing left of them, of me, to torture in Hell.

It was always the devil at fault and I could no longer overlook the details.

Not when Poppy...

I sighed, clutching my arms a little closer across myself. The infirmary was always so cold at night, and I wondered if Nurse Blainey was ensuring that she kept students fresh in the event of any passing.

I tucked another blanket over Poppy's body before leaning back against the chair that I had scooted close to her. My eyes never left her as I ensured that I was seeing her chest rise and fall, my ears tuned in to the sounds of her soft breathing.

Her face looked so peaceful as she slept and I wanted to enjoy some made up sentiment that she was alive, and we'd been lucky. However I knew better, we had been too fucking lucky that she'd survived my idiocy and that Blainey had even been able to put her in a stable condition.

Fortunate enough for it all to just end up with Poppy being put in a coma that we had no answers for.

I sighed as I turned my head up to the roof, counting the seconds between each of Poppy's breaths. The truest thing that I had to be grateful for was that Natsai hadn't told the nurse what had occurred in the Vivarium, or what had truly become of Poppy. I owed her for that, but I had a strong feeling that I was not through with Natty's anger.