Starglow Basin We don't wanna go home

he stares at the enemy outside their gates without ever coming to the conclusion that they lurk within. it’s sangre’s unexpected vitriol that has him turn back, eyes briefly darkened in surprise. 

there’s no taking back those words. soto — the real soto — is unhurt by the venom. but the soto that has survived against all likelihood, been imprisoned and tortured, and now shared an unbreaking and deeply traumatized kinship with the only other known survivor who understands what he’s gone through — is stunned. 

he might have reeled were it not for the sharp drop abutting them. 

and it is the jaguar’s snarl that comes briefly to his ugly face; that instinct to strangle her and push her useless body right off the cliff — but she is not afraid of death anymore, is she? they share a mutual contempt for that endless echelon, because they both have experienced it and somehow escaped it. now, they’re worse than dead as they pick up the pieces of their former selves scarred like shrapnel around them. 

no, survivor is just another word for displaced. they may still draw breath, but what life is it when your past self is dead and the only good in you killed?

he sets back, the ghost of juarez fading. some other is speaking to him now.  in the back of his mind soto grapples for the control he is slowly losing. 

the edge is so close, his breaking point slung right over it. 

por qué? he wants to yell - but it is another expression far older than memory that comes to the surface too: et tu, sangre? 

rather than fight, he sinks to his hind end and stares — like so much of the living world, he’s simply run to exhaustion.