Chapter Text
Screaming, fires, burning pain. Every time he is claimed by the darkness of sleep he is brought back here. Crying, blood, and her. If it wasn't for her Bram knows he would be dead.
He "visits" her often that same horrible night replaying each time he slips into comatose.
The same dream no nightmare repeats each time.
The castle lit ablaze, a mob gathered outside, so much Carnage.
It never gets easier to watch but Bram doesn't hesitate to return to the dream each time. It is perhaps the only way he will ever see her again.
She is a shell of her previous self and it pains him to see her like this each time.
Her previously neat plaits of hair falling in disarray. Normally impeccably neat clothes are torn and stained with blood. A once graceful body laying crumbled surrounded by her ideals, each and every one carefully scribed delicately onto pages of notebook paper. His lovely wife, ever the idealist dying in a pool of her own blood.
She was a woman of principle, someone who stuck with her ideals to the end.
Her demise is entirely his own fault and he knows it.
But in the end she still smiled despite it all.
So he commits all of her to his memory big and small.
Hard won loyalty to those whom she so cherished.
A love of for literature particularly poetry
Peonies, her favorite flower which she kept braided in her hair
A tenacious nature and drive.
Always being ever Dependable
And even when something went against her plans, no matter though she may fluster she would push forward.
It's been so long. There's only so long he can hold on each day she seems to fade. He can’t even remember her name anymore.
He has long accepted that this horrible wretched dream is the only way he may see her again. Lovely even in death. But when he is forced awake he desperately tries to remember her so painfully human.
(But it’s been so long, does he even remember her correctly?)
But recently he's been forced to stay awake for much longer. And the world has changed so. It's so... Loud. And though he is bound By The Sword, (Given the name Soluz Levni) to his coffin by that man he one day meets someone new. A young girl by the name of Aya.
She's resourceful and sharp and Bram can't help but think of his own daughter. She's running from that man, Kamui.
Bram can't help but feel a sense of affection for her.
Yet for whatever reason the little Mortal has taken to calling him "Bram-Chan" for reasons he cannot quite understand.
He whom has been declared 1 of the 10 calamities to rake humankind, “the lord of the undead", but Bram-Chan? Such a demeaning nickname is an insult in of itself but he can’t bring himself to complain much.
She introduces him to a world so full of sounds not just music but stories. Stories of Aya and the people around her.
And in a strange way Bram feels as though he is beginning to know these people too. The ways that Aya describes them brings a sense of familiarity to him and he can't help but Think of others from his past.
"Hey Bram-Chan?"
Speaking of the child, He turns his head to look at her.
"I just wanted to thank you for looking after me. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t let me stay." Aya turns to look at him, her eyes bright yet a bit watery. Bram feels an unexpected pang in his chest, a strange, unfamiliar ache. He wishes he could wipe away those tears, though he knows he can’t.
She lowers her gaze briefly, then looks up again, her voice steady despite the tears. "Well, anyway, when this is all over... would you like to meet some of the people from my stories?"
Her eyes are filled with such hope, such a quiet kind of optimism that it catches him off guard. For a moment, time seems to stretch as he searches her face, her youthful earnestness. The question hangs in the air, simple but profound. Something stirs inside him—an emotion he’s almost forgotten how to name.
The answer slips from his lips without hesitation, and for reasons he can’t quite understand, his lips curve into a small, genuine smile.
"Of course."