nothing to fear

twin flame

Once there was a bird in the shape of a boy. The first of many. 

He failed. He fell. So many scars left behind. 

Then he returned after the winter, as birds often do. 

He gathered a new flock. But in doing so, he forgot how to fly. 

And now his song is just noise.

Chapter 5

For a month, he wastes away. 

Finds the cracks in the wall he built for himself. Paints them over and pretends. 

He strips off layers of ruin he didn't even know he had. Resurrects as new flesh. 

It's a strange feeling, knowing you don't want to be alive anymore. A blessing. You no longer awaken for yourself, but simply to see what may happen tomorrow. 

The fatigue whisps over him like a veil over his skin. Grey and cold, glitching out the fuzz. Invisible to all. 

Except one. 

A black essence curls around Robin at the witching hour, prying his eyelids open like there was a ghost lodged between them. And then he hears it. 

Raw, animalistic sobs, quivering up and down into a sputtered wail before tapering off into a choke. Every atom of the darkness was screaming in unison, wretched with a shredded plea of despair. He recognized it as his own. 

He toed off his bedsheets and staggered down the hall. Her weeping seemed to teleport of its own accord, surging in the charge of lamps and inanimate objects. 

In the corner of the most obscure of the hallways that lined the tower, where the moonlight abandoned to pure obsidian, lay an indigo-haired teenager swaddled in her cloak like a crying baby. 

"Raven?" He wiped the bleariness from his cornea. She scrunched further into her cape's folds. 

"Robin...you're making me..." Her prayer staggered with tears, chin trembling. A second wave of salt sprung from her eyelashes, followed by another muffled howl. 

"Hey it's ok, it's ok." He patted between her shoulder blades, coaxing her out in the same parental tone he used when the loss of her powers transformed her into a kid. "What hap-"

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" She whipped her head around and gave a demonic snarl, her third eye and horns strobing in and out of opacity. Even her succubus form, whom he had unfortunately encountered many times as a side effect of their mental bond was never this...alien. 

He could swear he almost saw green. 

"Oh, Azar. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She scrunched back into a dejected slump, mumbling spells to quench her anger. Her snarl was now a mewl. 

He already knew why. Only 2 people near her empathic radar could have differences to that extreme. 

"Are you-" 

"It's an outpour." Her second sight anticipated his thought before he finished it. "A flood. It dies down one day, but then the next...there's so much anguish, Robin." She clutched her blood-red chakra as if to pry her burdens from her brow.

The shackles of her violet gaze locked him in. "And you're not the only one." 

"Oh."

Numbness is protection. And when his house of cards collapses, it opens a chasm. Singeing his veins to ash. 

The fire whispers better luck next time.

His agony swings back and forth between them. "Fuck, Raven, why didn't you tell me? If this is affecting you-"