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“She was so much larger than life,” Persephone says, “It’s beyond stupid… but, I thought she’d never die.”
“Huh?” Baphomet cocks his head to the side, but she’s got his attention at least.
“You asked me about Luci once. What she was like,” Persephone explains. She thinks the pain has finally dulled enough to be bearable, or maybe it’s just the better alternative - to focus on the pain she’s grown familiar with rather than the ones that still make her lungs seize and her throat collapse on itself. Maybe she’s just now found an answer.
And yet her voice cracks when she finally admits, “I believed.”
His silence says that Baphomet understands.
“I thought she’d find a way out. I wanted to think I could save her.” It’s like the floodgates have opened up, and Persephone can’t stop the words from pouring out of her. All of the half-conceived notions and maybes, the regrets and the wishes and the wants. She almost wishes she could cry, but the ache in her goes so much deeper than that. “I thought I knew how this game was played. Turns out I didn’t understand anything.”
“Laura,”
His lapse is what she needs to pull herself back together, if only for a moment, snap the mask back in place. “It’s Persephone.”
She can’t be Laura, not now and never again.
Laura’s not strong enough to bear the earth crushing down on her, the cold certainty of more loss and still more to lose than she ever thought possible.
Laura was never going to make it, but eventually Persephone will rise again. She always does.
And so she has to.
“I didn’t mean - I’m sorry.” He says he lies about everything, but not this. “I get it.”
He does, and so does Persephone. Lies can’t hurt you like the truth can. It’s a more comfortable thing to believe in. More than certainty, or gods, or girls thrust under the weight of the world’s paradoxes.
Persephone almost laughs imagining Cassandra’s reaction to that. She’ll never understand. The truth is never enough. It’s all too messy, all too human.
All too real.
They sit in silence. Far too long; more comfortable than it has any right to be.
...
“You think spring will ever come?” she asks Baphomet, half rhetorically, not sure if it's reassurance anymore. Persephone’s starting to think it’d be terrifying if she could feel enough to manage that, but instead it seems like some far-off fever dream; too distant to even consider. The sun’s a forgotten memory of its own.
He huffs a breath, not amused but something like it. “Sure,” Baphomet humors her.
And if that’s a lie, it’s one Persephone can live with.