MEMENTO
Written on October 14, 2024 (♎︎)
Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2024 for prompt No. 14: Left for Dead ("Cause I want you to know what it feels like to be haunted").
Miluda had thought herself pragmatic and plain-spoken about it: the revolution was doomed. If her brother did not listen to the pronouncement, it was no fault in her clarity. She had been clear all her life with him, and he had honed his expertise in evading her meaning. The revolution was doomed, and Wiegraf would doom the universe beyond it before he gave it acknowledgement.
The Northern Sky had taken three-thousand in the fortnight past, and Miluda was headed northward. They had met at a farmhouse outside Dorter to play at strategizing–to keep up the farce that there was some path remaining to victory. She had no means to advise him that this farewell was like as not their last.
As she tried and failed once again to explain herself, there came an ache in her chest–a feeling that her lungs had filled themselves with sand. Reason fell away. She looked to her brother and saw in him a look like a child’s.
Miluda reached to bow his head down to hers–thinking to kiss him on the forehead but stopping short. A kiss on the lips, improper to the moment and to her, would be a gesture he must remember.
BACK