Re: log: cemetery - revenant and misha
'Folks.' So charmingly folksy, so caring and sweet. "They know better than to rely on me. They never knew me well in the first place. My family is dead, my friends are long gone. There are a very few who know me now." He could count them on one hand, and they lacked Misha's disappointment. "I don't have Claire," he said, lids drooping, a moment of clarity. Claire was far from him. He had taken what he needed and done what needed to be done, and even after he helped her kill her Nemesis, he knew she was disappointed, too.
He smiled, when Misha confirmed his love. "It doesn't really mean anything," he said, voice gone rough. "It's just a milestone." But it did mean something, and it had been missed, and it had meant something to her, a chance to prove two people could commit to each other in a courthouse, fuck the church, but in a courthouse, and prove wrong the fate of parents who went mad or never loved each other in the first place, prove that the stupid institution did still hold some weight. Tradition, as they both had understood, had meaning, as much as they both bucked it. To stand as man and wife, that would have meant something. Another regret, another card in the discard pile. "Death could." Death came between all things.
He wasn't attempting to intimidate. He was reaching for the grave, thinking on the prospect of death, thinking about the man beneath his feet, his tendons and muscle rotted to compost, only the stone left behind. "Then how do I feel it?" He looked up and Misha, and he touched those sickening claws to his own heart. "I feel it when they die. When they cry out. I know. I cannot hold. How?" If it was nothing but a purpose he had made for himself, how could that be possible? If this was all a dream, how could he know where to go when strangers cried out for blood?
"She is long gone," he said, thickly. He pressed his forehead to the gravestone, beneath Misha's feet. It was nice and cool. "I miss her."
He took Misha's hand, still with his skin against the stone, and felt a flush of warmth - of love, of goodness, of all the right things in the world. Of concern for fellows, of aid, of help, of light. He shifted, pressed his cheek against the stone, and let go of Misha's hand.
"I'm not like you," he said. "I can't be divine. I can't forgive."