The Keepers' Evil

Fifty-Nine: Thank you, Miriam

Song- What was I made for?: Billie Eilish

"Thank you, Miriam."

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

One week prior.

Sebastian was always quick to yank his neck from the pensieve, so fast to withdraw his mind from Isidora's. He didn't like how much of himself he found in the past of the dead, he felt that it detached his hurt from being just memories to reconnect it to this space and this time, and he could see the ghosts leak from the creaky stone of the graveyard.

But I wanted to stay there and feel her pain because nobody else had, I craved to remain in her soul because she clung to mine. Swimming in the silver strands of the pensieve's puddle, I lifted my head slowly, ever so slowly, as if to tug and pull at the connection between Isidora's mind and my own, to prolong the ache of her pain in my own heart so that she was not alone.

Even in death and memory, Isidora Morganach felt alone.

Sebastian's eyes had held my body long before I had turned to face him. He wore his soul on the surface of his pupils like he was a lost being trying to guide another lost existence. Sebastian's soul was no treasure map but rather the accumulation of his torture and his pain, a noose that eroded the skin around my neck and left me to choke. Sebastian's soul was unhealthy to want, that much was evident when we couldn't find what he wanted to see, but it was all that I had ever known, and to know was to belong to the outcasted.

"Maddie-" His voice longed for me to hear what he had, to find the piece of hope that he so desperately wore on his lips to place where it was dark. His arms fought my defence, wove their way to my waist where he could hold me in the softest, kindest, of restraints.

I had sighed into my throat, placed my hands upon his chest to feel where his heart reminded me that he was just seeking for the world to be better, and let my eyes falter closed where the silent darkness did not make it any easier to tell him that hope was not so easily found in the life of Isidora.

"She still didn't say it, Seb. She screamed it as a maybe, we still don't know that it's possible to remove Anne's physical pain." We knew very little, Sebastian knew that, that was why he craved to find faith in the smallest of nothings. I felt his arms try to discreetly hide how they dropped against my bones in his falter of chance, but his eyes still tried to find something of a light in mine as my fingers roped around his wrists to catch where he fell.

A smile of mine met the gentle embrace of the dark space of his mind and it was cunning, almost manipulative enough to convince my smile to leave. But he knew me better than that, and somewhere inside, a light was turned on.

My hands slid down his arms, ruffling the cuffs of his shirt, letting my eyes fixate on the licks of blue and pink paint that clung to his skin over what was a continuation of the four walls that marked his prison cell. There was always hope that could be found in a love that could not be wavered, but it was not always the hope that Sebastian wanted it to be.

"We still have one more memory." He had stated it as though it would re-ignite the shared hope that we were supposed to have held, that we had held until that very point. We were too close to the end of her life to find life there again, we had known how the story ended yet it had not consumed us with a conclusion like we had needed.