Chapter Text
Omen liked to talk about death.
How it felt, in oppressive darkness, to be ripped apart. How many times, in searing screams, he’d departed from this godawful world. How the kills and the deaths formed a hazy pyramid of skulls upon which Sage could charge her ultimate. What it meant, to have pieces siphoned off, one by one, and pasted back onto each other in a motley, misshapen heap.
But to shatter?
No. Omen had never come close, and never, ever would. He could physically come close to Cypher: ripping the Moroccan flesh open with claws pinched dearly on the insides of tanned thighs, caressing the Moroccan flesh with whispered words of love, stretching the Moroccan flesh with hips angled in just the wrong right way; over and over again, he could die like it meant nothing. But he would never know what it meant to shatter, and walk away barely intact.
Cypher could still hear the noise. Her voice, as he'd buried himself in her, her cries, as she'd bore his children. He was young then, happy to be nothing more than a desert rat, grateful that he could keep them alive with nothing more than a sharp mind (nevermind what it was used for). He hadn’t felt beautiful, but knew what he had was.
But God was cruel. God was more cruel than any man, woman, or child that had ever walked this earth, choosing thunder-clap violence over floral-scented benevolence at every chance laid before it. Nora had died in Cypher’s arms, blood on the rocks upon which he knelt, giving nothing more in her last moments than an unfulfilled promise and a sigh. He’d always known his sins were punishable, but not by the theft of her life.
Love was never a fair trade, was it?
Ever since he’d buried her in the sand, he was haunted by the echoes: hearing without ears that awful choking breath and the simultaneous splintering of his own soul.
It sounded like a rock thrown at a mirror.
He knew, because he’d done that when no longer able to bear meeting himself in the eye.
Omen might have felt the incessant lust of death brush his cheek hundreds of times. He might have danced within its greedy tendrils, learning to embrace that which tortured and yet evaded him. But that shadow had never lost the embrace of someone who had made him whole. Death would always be home for the wraith, but for Cypher, death had stolen his.
Omen was torn. Cypher had been shattered.
At least the shadow thought it could heal him.