The Keepers' Evil

Sixty-Four: For better or for worse

Song- Home: Dotan

Trigger warning... for it being the last chapter

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"For better or for worse."

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"What do you dream about?" I whispered, not to Sebastian but to his heart. "Is it nice there?" I added, using the black ink of the night to hide the silence that would return to me. I took a deep breath, burying myself further into the knitted knots of the woven blanket that I had looped around Sebastian and I. "Am I there?" That was the final question, a question that bore more weight as a statement disguised as a question.

It was a statement that showed me the damage that Sebastian and I had inflicted to the ties that attached our hearts.

"You're always there, my love."

I startled with a gasp so forceful that it stung my throat, swearing underneath my breath at the figure before me and the voice that was not quite his, but his enough that it caught me without words of my own.

In the face of him, I would always smile, and a laugh always followed closely behind.

"Good to know that I'm going insane without you." I pulled myself from the lifeless body that was my Sebastian as I found the voice to speak, and walked towards the one that was crafted cleverly by my mind.

He looked the same with that ridiculous smirk and folded arms, but I had been there too many times to believe that this figure of him could speak any form of the truth.

But it didn't mean that I couldn't pretend that he could.

"It's quite the compliment, sweetheart." Sebastian huffed a chuckle through the end of his sentence, keeping his arms folded and close to his chest. He almost did not take notice of me now standing before me, and I wanted to berate my mind for forcing me away from the affection that I needed from him.

Sebastian's eyes searched the room like he had come to specifically look for something, landing directly on the very thing that I had been choosing to ignore for hours.

"What's all this for?" He finally asked after a silence that matched the candles still flames. His fingers flickered towards the burnt former portrait of Isidora, nodding his head slightly too as if I couldn't know what it was without it.

I scoffed, not playfully, but firmly. "If you're here, you're in my head. You know what it's for."

"I am you, so why are you questioning it?" He answered instantly, not wasting a moment between the end of my retort and the beginning of his counter. "Go on, enlighten me."

I folded my arms to mirror his, but they couldn't be as relaxed as his were. Mine were tough, almost vine-like as they wrapped into one another. They matched the rigid click of my heels against the stone floor as I took several too many steps towards the portrait that I had carelessly slung against one of the brick pillars that held the Undercroft together.

It was muddied and caked in ash as though that was what the paint had consisted of in the first place, its frame beaten and cracked through the canvas itself. It was strange how fitting it had truly felt, how broken her story had been before someone had picked it up.