( heartbreak moves in inches, ash finds. not miles.
it doesn’t feel real the first 24 hours. existence without embry is futile — is less than futile, ash finds. he has to remember how to breathe. his heart doesn’t beat but it does clot, like an angry, infected wound. every time he thinks about embry it picks the scab in one messy tear, a river flow of emotions dumped in the empty cavity of his chest. he remembers. one time, embry got him to share a cigarette in the backdrop woods of their army camp, and laughed while ash coughed with the wheezing pain of smoke in his lungs, punching him boyishly on the shoulder.
ash remembers thinking, no one in the world has warmer hands than embry moore.
except, they aren’t warm now. they’re cold and gray, the fingernails pale and lifeless, lips dry and cracked. embry moore, the life of every party. embry moore, every good army boy’s hall pass. embry moore, the man ash would’ve doodled little hearts around his name and written mr. ashley moore in his school boy notebooks if they met a decade earlier.
ash spends all his energy on crying, until there aren’t any tears left. exhaustion forces him to sleep, curled up in a ball on the floor in his room, thinking about embry’s hands. )
( when ash was twenty-seven, he had a dream about embry moore.
embry has one of those faces you could see on a gallant knight of the realm, on a dapper prince in some long forgotten country, on some military man saving you from a fire. ash dreamed he had a suit of armor clinging to his chest, a helmet under his arm, his chestnut curls plastered against his sweaty forehead. he knelt before ash, a playful, promising look in his eyes. when ash dreams tonight, he has the same dream, only when he goes to pet embry’s head it falls off his shoulders, hand fisted in the hair of his decapitated head, blood draining out of him like a waterfall, like the tears from ash's eyes. his mouth lolls open. it says weren’t you supposed to die for me?
ash decides he isn’t going to sleep again. not for a long, long time. )
( ironically, when he wakes up, there’s a ring on his bedside table.
he stares at it for a long time, pinched between his pointer and thumb fingers. it’s not just any ring — it’s the ring. he doesn’t know why it’s here or how it got here, but it feels like some cosmic sign, the fates of the world pointing and laughing at his misery. ash is sure if anyone could see him right now, they’d look right through him. he’d be invisible, intangible, completely empty of anything leftover. he bought this ring on a soldier’s measly budget. he saved up. it’s not ugly, but it’s not fancy. when he handed over the foreign money, he didn’t think about it being shabby or cheap or not up to moore-leffey standards. he thought about embry. endless days away from politics, away from war, soaking in the sun, fucking when they wanted, arguing over classic lit. he thought about embry saying i know it’ll be hard but i don’t care, i don’t care, i don’t care. he thought, i want you, i love you. he thought, it will always, always be you. yes.
it’s an ugly thing, now. broken promises on a silver band. he was supposed to protect embry. he failed.
ash wonders how tasteless it would be to slip it onto embry’s cold, dead finger. let him rest with the evidence of ash’s love, undying. he decides — very distasteful. embry said no. twice.
but it’s a yes from ash, so he puts it on his finger. it’s a little too small. by the end of the service his finger is a shade redder than the rest and gone numb. it’s like embry saying give it up already, colchester. you can’t propose to a corpse. )
( ash presses a hand over the cold stone of embry’s mausoleum. it feels a lot like his skin had, like marble melted and cast, like iron chipped. ash always thought he was as pretty as a statue — the thought sickens him now. embry is the furthest thing from cold.
he stops for a long time and thinks about what to say. a million different memories hit him like the bullets of an automatic rifle, all of them perfect and painful and ruined. one time they laid outside embry’s family home in the salty seattle rain, and ash kissed the dewdrops of embry’s eyelashes like a kitten, ignoring him pushing him off, which turned into wrestling, which turned into embry face down in the mud, ash pumping his cock inside him, sinking teeth so deep into his shoulder, blood poured into his mouth.
embry still has a little scar from where he did it. had.
he remembers thinking in the giddy, almost girlish afterglow, how is this possible? how can i love someone this deeply, and not have it back?
but he knows — he had it. he had embry, even if he never heard yes. that isn’t really the point of loving someone. it’s that he saw embry, all of embry, every inch, inside and out. his playboy facade, his dirty death wish, his cannibalizing want that turned his soft center into electricity, reactive and vicious. it’s that ash didn’t care about all his bad traits. he loved those too. jesus christ. jesus christ, he loves him so much. more than god, more than faith, more than politics, more than anything. more than everything.
the point of his finger traces some swirly filigree on the carved stone, and imagines the center dip in embry’s collarbone. he bends forward and puts his mouth on it, kisses the stone. )
It was always you. ( he imagines embry’s laugh. realizes he’ll never hear it again. ) Yeah. I know.
( it isn’t until ash is alone again that he realizes he’s a widow. again.
he had time to anticipate jenny’s death. not a lot of it, but still some. she was sick. embry is, was, had been, he — he was healthy and fine. now he’s dead and not just dead but massacred, disrespected, made into butcher meat by a hand that exists within the manor. someone did it. it was done to him.
he thinks about a body tied to a chariot. paraded. gloated. dragged like a dog. a corpse turned to a trophy. )
( millions of american high school students nationwide will read the iliad this year and wonder why achilles was too egotistical to take patroclus’ warning post mortem.
ash won’t wonder. it doesn’t matter what the history books say about your cruel, animalistic nature — it won’t matter if you’re portrayed a villain, a monster, some evil, selfish thing. ash is achilles and he knows the truth no one else can.
the world starts and ends with patroclus. when the sun rises, ash’s idealism does not rise with it. he thinks of one thing, and one thing alone: vengeance. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
— one of six.
it doesn’t feel real the first 24 hours. existence without embry is futile — is less than futile, ash finds. he has to remember how to breathe. his heart doesn’t beat but it does clot, like an angry, infected wound. every time he thinks about embry it picks the scab in one messy tear, a river flow of emotions dumped in the empty cavity of his chest. he remembers. one time, embry got him to share a cigarette in the backdrop woods of their army camp, and laughed while ash coughed with the wheezing pain of smoke in his lungs, punching him boyishly on the shoulder.
ash remembers thinking, no one in the world has warmer hands than embry moore.
except, they aren’t warm now. they’re cold and gray, the fingernails pale and lifeless, lips dry and cracked. embry moore, the life of every party. embry moore, every good army boy’s hall pass. embry moore, the man ash would’ve doodled little hearts around his name and written mr. ashley moore in his school boy notebooks if they met a decade earlier.
ash spends all his energy on crying, until there aren’t any tears left. exhaustion forces him to sleep, curled up in a ball on the floor in his room, thinking about embry’s hands. )
— two of six.
embry has one of those faces you could see on a gallant knight of the realm, on a dapper prince in some long forgotten country, on some military man saving you from a fire. ash dreamed he had a suit of armor clinging to his chest, a helmet under his arm, his chestnut curls plastered against his sweaty forehead. he knelt before ash, a playful, promising look in his eyes. when ash dreams tonight, he has the same dream, only when he goes to pet embry’s head it falls off his shoulders, hand fisted in the hair of his decapitated head, blood draining out of him like a waterfall, like the tears from ash's eyes. his mouth lolls open. it says weren’t you supposed to die for me?
ash decides he isn’t going to sleep again. not for a long, long time. )
— three of six.
he stares at it for a long time, pinched between his pointer and thumb fingers. it’s not just any ring — it’s the ring. he doesn’t know why it’s here or how it got here, but it feels like some cosmic sign, the fates of the world pointing and laughing at his misery. ash is sure if anyone could see him right now, they’d look right through him. he’d be invisible, intangible, completely empty of anything leftover. he bought this ring on a soldier’s measly budget. he saved up. it’s not ugly, but it’s not fancy. when he handed over the foreign money, he didn’t think about it being shabby or cheap or not up to moore-leffey standards. he thought about embry. endless days away from politics, away from war, soaking in the sun, fucking when they wanted, arguing over classic lit. he thought about embry saying i know it’ll be hard but i don’t care, i don’t care, i don’t care. he thought, i want you, i love you. he thought, it will always, always be you. yes.
it’s an ugly thing, now. broken promises on a silver band. he was supposed to protect embry. he failed.
ash wonders how tasteless it would be to slip it onto embry’s cold, dead finger. let him rest with the evidence of ash’s love, undying. he decides — very distasteful. embry said no. twice.
but it’s a yes from ash, so he puts it on his finger. it’s a little too small. by the end of the service his finger is a shade redder than the rest and gone numb. it’s like embry saying give it up already, colchester. you can’t propose to a corpse. )
— four of six.
he stops for a long time and thinks about what to say. a million different memories hit him like the bullets of an automatic rifle, all of them perfect and painful and ruined. one time they laid outside embry’s family home in the salty seattle rain, and ash kissed the dewdrops of embry’s eyelashes like a kitten, ignoring him pushing him off, which turned into wrestling, which turned into embry face down in the mud, ash pumping his cock inside him, sinking teeth so deep into his shoulder, blood poured into his mouth.
embry still has a little scar from where he did it. had.
he remembers thinking in the giddy, almost girlish afterglow, how is this possible? how can i love someone this deeply, and not have it back?
but he knows — he had it. he had embry, even if he never heard yes. that isn’t really the point of loving someone. it’s that he saw embry, all of embry, every inch, inside and out. his playboy facade, his dirty death wish, his cannibalizing want that turned his soft center into electricity, reactive and vicious. it’s that ash didn’t care about all his bad traits. he loved those too. jesus christ. jesus christ, he loves him so much. more than god, more than faith, more than politics, more than anything. more than everything.
the point of his finger traces some swirly filigree on the carved stone, and imagines the center dip in embry’s collarbone. he bends forward and puts his mouth on it, kisses the stone. )
It was always you. ( he imagines embry’s laugh. realizes he’ll never hear it again. ) Yeah. I know.
— five of six.
he had time to anticipate jenny’s death. not a lot of it, but still some. she was sick. embry is, was, had been, he — he was healthy and fine. now he’s dead and not just dead but massacred, disrespected, made into butcher meat by a hand that exists within the manor. someone did it. it was done to him.
he thinks about a body tied to a chariot. paraded. gloated. dragged like a dog. a corpse turned to a trophy. )
— six of six.
ash won’t wonder. it doesn’t matter what the history books say about your cruel, animalistic nature — it won’t matter if you’re portrayed a villain, a monster, some evil, selfish thing. ash is achilles and he knows the truth no one else can.
the world starts and ends with patroclus. when the sun rises, ash’s idealism does not rise with it. he thinks of one thing, and one thing alone: vengeance. )