✓ | 𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗿𝘂𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀, luke castellan

ꜱᴇᴠᴇɴᴛʏ-ɴɪɴᴇ

Requiem at Dawn's End.

🌃

"I'm not leaving here until you eat," Chris declared, his voice firm with a determination Rory hadn't heard in what felt like lifetimes.

She didn't react.

What was there to say?

Rory sat curled in the corner, her back pressed against the cold stone wall, her arms limp at her sides. She had long stopped keeping track of the days, the months. Maybe it had been a year. Maybe more.

Time had dulled into a meaningless blur.

She did eat—sometimes. Just enough to keep her body from completely giving out. Just enough to exist. Not because she wanted to, not because she saw any reason to, but because... because there was something instinctual in survival. Something deeply human in the way the body fought, even when the soul had stopped trying.

Why?

She had no reason left.

Luke was dead.

She thought that fact would have shattered her entirely. Maybe it had. Maybe this was what was left of her, scattered fragments held together by nothing but habit.

And yet, here she was.

Alive.

Barely.

Still breathing, still eating just enough to continue on, even though there was nothing left to continue for.

Rory closed her eyes, pressing the heels of her hands against them, as if she could shut it all out. As if she could force herself into nothingness.

But the words whispered through her mind anyway.

The prophecy.

How it had unraveled, not in some grand, explosive moment, but in pieces—slowly, bit by bit, until it had come true without her even realizing.

"Dawn’s child in shadows, love betrays."

Her throat felt tight.

Dawn’s child.

That had to be her, didn’t it?

She had spent so much time in the darkness, even now, cloaked in shadow, in grief, in the hollow remains of what used to be. But maybe it meant something else. Maybe it meant she had betrayed Luke in the shadows, behind his back, a quiet, creeping betrayal.

And love—love betrays.

She had loved him.

More than anything.

More than she should have, maybe.

And he had loved her.

But love hadn’t saved them. Love hadn’t been enough.

"The son of Hermes, trust decays."

Rory exhaled shakily, her fingers tightening into fists.

There it was. Proof. The confirmation that this prophecy had always been about them.

Dawn’s child and the son of Hermes.

Rory and Luke.

They had stopped trusting each other long before the end.

Not all at once.

Not in some dramatic, singular moment.

It had been slow.

A thousand little betrayals, so small they hadn’t noticed them at first, not until it was too late.

Rory had lied.