isolt griffin
Little is there to be done to disguise the familiarity, the remorse, that twists so readily into every azure helix of Isolt's eyes as she looks upon him in his current state. Evidence of festering emotional wounds could be seen there as easily as if she had borne them so outrightly upon the pallor of her chilled flesh. Only this weeping pseudo-wound was there in the gaping margin wherein the dreamed-of denouement had been her greatest hope. Isolt had witnessed, as Davante's siblings surely had, her brother's descent into the barbed, pitted cesspool of the chemical trough. She had fought, clawed, wept, and pled for his salvation; she had prayed upon buckled knee for Aaron's soul to be imbued with the wherewithal it would have taken for him to cast away these ponderous chains that had been of his own making. And yet for all of her toils had she been met only with thrown fists and an acid tongue so beleaguering that the wounds it had induced ailed her still. But she loved him wholly and without pause, adored him in a manner that was naught but wholesomely and beautifully tragic.

Yet still had she lost him, the all-too-brief and teasing glimpse of him she had been privvy to in the small morsel of time separating death from "awakening" had been the cruelest in a series of daggers that immortality would eventually come to take to her tender heart. She had lost him... but she would not allow Davante's brethren to know the same heartbreak she, herself, still grappled with years later. She was stronger now, medical training having made her far more fit to handle this and many other situations. Too late might it have been to benefit Aaron, yet Isolt knew without having to proffer a moment of silent consideration to the notion that she would aide him in this, perhaps the most grueling battle he would ever wage.

A tentative simper pulls delicately at the plush cushions of her ruby lips at his words, his apology met with the ever-so-subtle shaking of her fire-crowned head. "I became a doctor so that people could come to me when they needed it most... this is what I was meant to do," she soothes, allowing the silence to permeate the distance that separates them for a time, continuing to dab the cloth gently unto his heated flesh. Slowly does she move to withdraw her hand, slender digits knotting anticipatorily within her lap as her eyes venture to their clasped tangle. Isolt does not dare look at him when next she speaks, the syllables she offers him far too raw, far too near to her savaged heart to allow such an intimate gesture. "You don't have to talk to me about if you don't want to, God knows my brother never did, but you should talk to someone about it, Davante. I don't want to see you disappear down this road, and I can help you... if you'll let me." In an attempt to bolster herself against the tide of crimson tears that threatens just beyond the surfaces of her eyes, Isolt turns from him to glance at the photographs still perched upon her bureau. Happier faces sequestered in happier times that were so far, far removed from this tenebrific present and the young couple who had been left behind.