[Mortals] Mending

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Julius: relief, sand, maroon from akonken

Actual hourglasses are not easy to come by, but the soft hiss of the sand is a fine focus for meditation; better than any white noise generator. It calms him, softening his senses and letting him drift into a deep trance, mind and body relaxed.

He focuses on the moment, the breaking point; the flash of rage and the cold, hard resolution to act. It was, he knows, an abberation, born of frustration. He had felt something like it before, when Tats's elbow connected with Jayne's face with such hideous brutality. Then, however, there had been... almost a purity to it.

He could still feel it whenever he thought of Tats: white hot anger, steel-bright determination; the utter certainty that if he fell to Mike's sedative darts then he would never wake again. He feels it anew each time he renews his promise to himself: That he will never let Tats come into his care or into his power, because he knows with an inescapable certainty that if he does, he will kill him.

This was not that rage. This was anger at an idea, swirling together with resentment. The monster that he conceived this hatred for did not exist; the target of his anger was nothing so dramatic or meaningful. He was not a brute, nor a torturer, just a hollow shell of lies wrapped around an empty husk. Julius knew that his hatred only defined Royal, as surely as any adulation; only Emma saw him clearly. Emma, and perhaps Jayne.

To admit that one had lost one's clarity was hard, especially for a man trained to see clearly. Having once admitted it, however, the challenge became relief. He could face the truth of what he had done; what he had almost become. He could admit that what drove him to the edge was not the burns on Anna's arms, nor the sudden, groundless conviction that Royal had inflicted them, it was the searing humiliation of knowing that none of them would ever really listen to him; not the way they listened to Royal.

And at that moment he had wanted to make them listen; to win the game and become what he had set out to destroy.

Only his mistake had saved him; the sudden realisation of his own arrogance. But then, as she left him, he had seen his real mistake.

Because someone had listened to him. She had always listened. He had just let himself get so sick with the supernatural, so full of anger and self-importance that he had lost sight of the one thing that counted for anything.

And so he chose to maroon himself, away from that world, from Kings and alchemists and cosmic tears, so that he could learn to see what mattered again; so that he could be the man she loved again, or at least a man that he did not hate.

The sand hissed steadily through the neck of the hourglass.