𝐓𝐎 𝐌𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐒

第十五 | FIFTEEN

sorry for the month wait! but I'm back :) be sure to comment and thank you again for 5k on Wattpad!

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Death was a strange thing. Or perhaps the feeling of death was odd, and not the word itself. Regret tasted bitter on your tongue as you plummeted down: you weren't regretful that you had sacrificed your life—you knew the day would come, anyways—but you were regretful of the amount of I love you's that you would have to swallow down your throat. Your love for him alone would carry down to the pits of hell.

Some could argue that it was Claude's fault you would die or get severely injured. But you feared that even if he plunged a dagger straight through your heart, even if he left your body to rot and to shrivel—you would have felt wistful.

Better to die by his hands than to never have felt them at all. Better to have felt that warmth than to never have experienced it.

Excruciating pain burst within your body as you made a strangled sound. Your body slammed onto the ground. Copper rushed to your mouth and you spluttered and choked, before your vision grew blurry. Your once fisted hands grew slack, becoming listless against the ground. Blood pooled from your body, matting the flowers. Blood was not water, and the flowers beneath you would die. But the tears that ran down your cheeks would grow a new life. The cost of one life; the birth of another.

You were too weak to muster up any words. Instead, you shut your eyes, embracing death.

Then darkness overtook your vision.

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Claude Valeria was not human.

He knew he wasn't—his powers killed, his aura terrified, and he found that it was terrifyingly hard for him to feel human emotions: it was like someone had carved a hole in his body, and had ripped out his heart. He knew only a few things—desire in wanting the crown, and anger. There was so much misplaced anger that he felt and directed towards others. His anger was not fiery, but merely cold, subtle, and distant.

He never lamented his birth. He knew from the start that he was unlucky to have been illegitimate, to have been denied his birthright. But Claude Valeria was a proud man. He knew he could usurp the throne: he knew that he was powerful enough. His childhood was still rather blissful with you inside. Claude wouldn't realise then—the fact that you had given him a human childhood. Claude would learn that there was human warmth in him, when he shared it with you with interlinked fingers. Claude would learn later that he was still undeniably human in many aspects. He could see that in his love, his raw, terrifying, spiraling love he had for you, that he was human.

You made him human. And yet you ripped that humanity away from him the day you died. Claude regarded you as so, very, very precious: he needed you desperately like oxygen. He wanted to give you everything in the world, he wanted his love to be made physical and traceable. And the terrifying thing was that only you made him happy. No one else. His reason for living would be gone the minute you disappeared.

Claude had seen you die that day, the day that human warmth had left you. And he had reversed time. He had changed things. He shifted things, and...

Still, you had been torn from him.

Again, just like that wretched day, he had felt your hand slip away from his.

He reached out to you again, his hand frozen in the air. His tears drenched his clothes as Claude started to sway, before he found that he could no longer breathe. He took one breath in: before he expelled another.  His heart hammered against the chest: Claude found himself barely able to breathe, choking on his sobs. He had half a mind to lunge after you—he wanted to plummet down just so he could see you—but he recalled your words.