isolt griffin

I'm more alive than I've ever been

There was a difference between heartache and heartbreak. Heartache was the pained, plaintiff cry into despair's tenebrific, seemingly-unending abyss. The brittle, disintegrating crag at the brim of that wide open, beckoning maw. The glacial tongue of dread is it skittered down the ridge of a spine.

Heartbreak was the plunge.

A single pale finger raises to her lover's cheek, gliding smoothly, gently, against the crimson trajectory of the tear that clashes so harshly with the otherworldly pallor of his skin. How very close was she to allowing her own tears to sully the taut planes of her cheeks with their ghastly crimson rivulets... and yet she battles their impending tide with every last morsel of strength she can grasp betwixt her desperately searching fingers. They would soon topple the fissure-creased veneer of her self-control, surely, but Isolt refused to allow that to be Lillian's one and only memory of her mother and father. There was a vast, unending life of tears that lay beyond the sterile steel of the hospital doors; an eternity for the shards of her obliterated heart to slowly and arduously slice away at every parcel of her that lay broken, caged only by a fleshy carapace.

That time would surely come, but for however long they might have with their daughter Isolt would bolster herself, bolster them, against the oppressive heft of the agony that cast its sordid breath against the napes of their necks. All that she wished for their daughter to know in her life, short though it undoubtedly would be, was the love held for her within this pair of stilled hearts. "This is your dad," she whispers to the pair, the heavenly cerulean of her eyes lingering upon the stern planes of her lover's face for a long moment before returning to the cherub cradled so very carefully within his arms. "Isn't he handsome?" The barest note of a chuckle bubbles beyond Isolt's closed lips as she reaches out towards the gently cooing infant, an impossibly-tiny hand reaching forth, unburdened by the sloth of hesitation, to clasp impossibly-tiny digits about her mother's index finger. The embrace is a sensorial, breathtaking; their daughter was so very strong. If only this strength could last... if only her mother had not failed her in this.

Carefully Isolt wraps her arms about the swaddled babe, pulling her daughter into the cradle of her own arms and resting against the comforting, solid frame of her husband. There they lay, a seemingly-peaceful family of three, for what could have been hours though in the troubled heart of the new mother it was naught more than the passing of a small handful of moments as she whispered to her daughter how very much she was loved. As if it would have ever been possible to rely a lifetime's worth of love into so few moments.

And then, suddenly and all at once, Isolt's skin was pulled taut into phantom gooseflesh in the barest moment before the infant in her arms drew a strangled, rasping half-breath... followed by another... and then another. The bellowing cry of before was no longer, the newborn struggling to rally enough oxygen to produce such a sound- this strife wrenching at Isolt's insides as she held their daughter, as helpless against the onslaught as she was. "It's okay, my love. It will all be better soon," she nearly croaked the words, her gullet clenching nearly to a close in a manner most agonizing. This, and only this, was all of the comfort that the crimson-haired vampire was capable of offering- the promise and comfort of death's numbness to this child that should have never been.

The end comes too swiftly, Lillian's tiny lungs no match for the battle pitted against them by forces so far beyond their control, the newborn's breaths coming slower and slower, made shallow by life's retreating tide. Her last is nearly a sigh... of relief, perhaps. "I'm so sorry," Isolt whispers before she lays her head back against the shoulder of her husband, her movements slow as if every last part of her had been filled to the brim with sand, her eyes staring beyond the pimpled tiles of the ceiling. Her façade pinches, crumbles into the grimace of agony that had lay in wait just beneath the surface as the crimson tears she had somehow abated fall in ghastly branches down the slopes of her upturned cheeks. She plunges then, into the abyss that awaits her.

This was heartbreak.