...Until Only The Unshakeable Remains
“You have to stop! You’re going to cause yourself permanent internal damage!”
“You are in the past now.”
Quirk didn't pause; he was shaking along the path with the occasional grunt of intense pain; he had gotten halfway out the door before he had collapsed the first time. He was in no fit state to continue: every step taken drained the reservoirs of his lifeblood. Fluttershy was dancing around him, desperately attempting to persuade him to stop his mad conquest while simultaneously refusing to arrest him with force. He tripped again and his head was cut clean, a great straight scar on his face erupted; he merely growled it away despite the vicious blots of blood falling to the earth.
“You shouldn’t do this to yourself! You don't deserve it!”
Quirk ignored her, pulling himself onto unsteady hooves with no sign of determination fading. Feminine tears mirrored his life dripping out into the earth; she looked on, standing at his side she pleaded for mercy for his own self.
“At least stop hurting yourself, even if you won’t stop hurting me!”
“I will not take what I do not deserve.”
Fluttershy glanced back for a moment at the horrific trail he had left behind, a scraped mess of his willed walking tainted with unmentionable dark red-black stains.
“Please…” She begged, and it was not so much pleading as a whimper. “I can’t stop you; you have to help yourself before I can help you.”
He moved on; his vision was a hemorrhage of marred perception and his bodily agony interfered with what little was left undisguised to his sight, until he could see naught but a great harsh-white blur of the sky and sun. The ground was trembling, quaking, seizing, but he rose again and his campaign of suffering was uninterrupted.
She looked on with sympathetic wrackings of her own body as he crawled and limped along; his saw-bladed breath was increasingly ragged and pathetic; with every miserable step taken she felt a stab ever-closer to her heart. He was a wreck beyond sane comprehension: bandages still lingered on his body to cover the most garish wounds, yet the mutilated mind shone horrifyingly through. The blackness of his corrupted soul seemed to have consumed all his being and Fluttershy could only look on with a sickly kind of worry- nothing that she was capable of could cease his destructive will. He would have to want healing of his own accord. Nothing else would suffice.
With broken steps and halting breaths, Quirk made the torturous journey back- all the way back to the pool- she was fearfully amazed that he had not passed out yet, but he was reaching the end. He was on cooler grass now, the inner crescent of the pool greeted him with tremulous ripples as he lurchingly approached, his movements just enough to disrupt it the slightest bit.
“Please don’t do this to yourself!” She shattered suddenly, weeping behind him. She could have looked away, yet somehow she found the strength not to. Quirk took no heed of it.
He crashed onto the shore as his effort exhausted, head inches from the water; the exorbitant effort to bring him there had cost him all and his corrupted mind could conceive of no other thing than the bottomless pool before him.
And the pool! Infinite depth, a transparent harrowing mass that had no substance- no, it seemed not to be real- his breath caught for an undefinable moment, for the longest instant he did not breathe. There was nothing in the invisibly deep abyss, a terrible blankness that called him; in that vast and perfectly clear liquid there was a void and the void promised him peace, yet it inspired a screaming horror somewhere in the darkness of his mind. There was no end to it, no end to the darkness; it would devour him left unchecked. And it called to him!- it called softly with a magnificent cold tone; whispering it suggested cathartic rumors of black nonexistence. It commanded his will and only the tiniest minority of his consciousness was wracked with terror because of it. The rest took the depth in awe, sought to become a part of the crushing abyss that so morbidly and tantalizing beckoned. He could muster no resistance; it was calling him… he would go to it and be nothing… it would liberate him from life and all the pain…
“Please stop...”
The desperate phrase shattered the mirage of infinite death for a moment; he saw his face reflected on the water’s surface. He screamed: it was a long, drawn-out and piercing, wrenching and painful cry, but for the first time something passed from his mouth that sounded natural to his guardian.
For there was a face in the water, and it was his face, and half was covered in blood and half was covered in tears and perspiration mixed and split diagonally. With that horrific expression he had observed himself; he saw what he had become and the imminent void he would enter if he did not change.
No! Not this way!
The baptism of blood was only halfway complete, but no longer would he submerge himself into the black depths to complete the profane immersion; he was terrified. The horror was too much for him.
I don’t want to go like this…
Behind him, Fluttershy stood with her stained face of tears, all attention forward on him who had sounded natural for the first time, as her care had always been. She was ready, eternally ready, to help him- but he had to allow it. He had to want it.
I want to be…
“You have to let go of your suffering. It won’t do you any good now.” She whispered, the last of the tears rolling off her face into empty air.
I want to live…
“You’re the only one who can really help you...” She wiped an errant tear off her face, revealing a clean and determined expression.
I want to love…
“...But I will help you as much as I can if you let me.” Her declaration strong, she moved to his side, looked down on him with great sympathy and concern and an uncontested capacity for kind understanding.
Fluttershy had spoken and exhausted the last ounce of her passion and certainty; she felt quite like fainting or fading into sensation in the aftermath of emotion but she refused to deny the demands, the virtues of her kindness. Quirk lay there for a minute more, the tears and blood flowing freely from wounds of body and mind. Tremulously, and quite unintentionally at first, with great terror and deliberation, he had changed the most miniscule portion of his perspective- a rock in a wall reaching beyond the sky- a drop in the temporal sea- the gears were set irrevocably into motion; the switch thrown could not be undone. Yet one obstacle towered still.
“I can’t wash myself clean.” He sounded pathetic, weak; he was humiliated in utter completion now; no longer did his voice enrapture minds and inspire subduing fear; he had lost his pain but none of his guilt. “I can’t fix what I’ve broken.”
“I believe that you can; I believe in you.”
She reached down into the water, and it was just a pool now; there was no illusion of death and drowning for either. She poured cold, gloriously clean water down his face and it provoked a sharp inhalation- she was washing away the blood- she was washing away his sweat and tears- he was cleaner, if only the slightest bit.
“You…” His weakened voice trailed off.
“I can help you start, if you’d like me to.”
"I remember; I hurt you..."
"I forgive you."
“Can you take me back?”
Without a further word, as gently as she was able, she of great delicacy lifted him up and placed him perpendicularly slung across her back. Heavy burden though he was, she bore it happily.
Morning in the forest was much nicer than the night of a few days past had been; even the once wince-causing breathing of Quirk seemed to have grown more peaceful as Fluttershy carried him. She could not tell if he was conscious or unconscious; he seemed to be seeing things that were not there, but she was confident that all would work out for the better. At long last, his life of pain had been absolved, and only the recovery remained.
Out of the forest and back up the path to the solitary cottage she carried his healing mass, back into the room where he had lay in sleeping and in agony and in waking, but never in isolation. The breeze reigned through the ethereal curtains. it was calm now in the house; the long journey to recovery had begun. He seemed not to be lucid, yet she took a wet cloth to his face and started gently scrubbing the liquid remnants of turmoil away regardless.
He breathed a little faster for a minute, until it seemed that he had gained a modicum of consciousness again- and he spoke, softly, quietly- she had to lean in to hear his words:
“Will you teach me how to sing?”
“I promise that I will, as soon as you can.”
Thank you... He would have said, but he was already dreaming. He sank further into the blankets and into a deep slumber, his eyes closed and he exhaled rattlingly, satisfyingly slow; he went back to sleep. Now,for the first time, he let himself heal. No more would memories slip from his grasp: He would treasure this, think on it, and all the trials and troubles and joy...
He would remember them.