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Feb. 19th, 2005 06:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sign_seekerWill sits on the floor, leaning back against one leg of his bed, arms folded on bent knees. His right hand is clasped loosely about his left wrist, and his thumb runs absently over his sign-scar, through the sweater.
His eyes are dry; he does not cry, as a rule, and tonight especially he does not want to feel liquid trickling down his cheeks, because then he would throw up, and then there would be questions and concern from his family for a sick youngest child, and from Paul for a deeper worry than that. He does not forget any of it, the ripping thorns and the pain and the spraying arcs of blood (and Jake's savage joy in the injury done to an enemy), for an Old One does not forget and may not forget even such things, but he does not think too closely of it.
He does not think either of the rightness of the rest of it, the blazing thrumming power in his mind and heart and bones, the love and the Circle linked and joined and calling. It would be wrong to think of one without the other, for they are too tightly interwoven to separate like that, as if he could pretend the shadows out of the long pattern or the price out of the joy. And there was a rightness too in the worst parts, in their savage violence and visceral humanity.
And for all of that, it did not quite work. Jake is back, and yet he is not Jake; he sits instead with near-strangers and pokes at his food, a young boy overwhelmed by strangeness and dizzying half-knowledge of what he does not remember. Some part of himself is still lost in the blackness, and for his family that formed the circle all the joy that balanced the pain and savagery is gone out of it, and the blazing victory is ashes.
So Will sits, and watches the wall numbly, and does not think of anything much. His hands are cold.
His eyes are dry; he does not cry, as a rule, and tonight especially he does not want to feel liquid trickling down his cheeks, because then he would throw up, and then there would be questions and concern from his family for a sick youngest child, and from Paul for a deeper worry than that. He does not forget any of it, the ripping thorns and the pain and the spraying arcs of blood (and Jake's savage joy in the injury done to an enemy), for an Old One does not forget and may not forget even such things, but he does not think too closely of it.
He does not think either of the rightness of the rest of it, the blazing thrumming power in his mind and heart and bones, the love and the Circle linked and joined and calling. It would be wrong to think of one without the other, for they are too tightly interwoven to separate like that, as if he could pretend the shadows out of the long pattern or the price out of the joy. And there was a rightness too in the worst parts, in their savage violence and visceral humanity.
And for all of that, it did not quite work. Jake is back, and yet he is not Jake; he sits instead with near-strangers and pokes at his food, a young boy overwhelmed by strangeness and dizzying half-knowledge of what he does not remember. Some part of himself is still lost in the blackness, and for his family that formed the circle all the joy that balanced the pain and savagery is gone out of it, and the blazing victory is ashes.
So Will sits, and watches the wall numbly, and does not think of anything much. His hands are cold.
