Lucilfer (ChrolloxReader)

Chapter 69

Cold—I was so very cold. But not exactly physically, or perhaps not only physically. My heart and mind and soul felt empty, but this was a separate emptiness than what I'd been feeling over the past seven days, and even before, due to what I kept secret from the one I trusted more than anyone else, the one I loved so unconditionally. This was a dragging emptiness, a forced vacancy brought on by the security I'd clung to being ruthlessly torn from me, gradually exerting more strength against what I held in my weakened hands, what I wished I could keep.

It's not true. It's not true.

It was so real. Everything I'd seen, everything I'd heard, was so real, and so heart wrenching—I truly had nothing in this world. I'd been flourishing under a perfectly executed farce, something that seemed so tangible, and something I still couldn't fathom as being deceit. And then, in the brief darkness of night, it was taken away from me. He had taken everything from me, and felt nothing in regard to the way I'd fell to my knees before him.

"I do not love you, (Y/n)."

There comes a point in such uncontrollable pain that reality is difficult to decipher from dreams. I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or not—my consciousness felt hazy, drowning under a stifling drug and the fleeting hope that time could turn back, because I couldn't hope that he would retract such a statement. It had sounded so genuine, so clear in the voice which always carried a way of flawlessly soothing any heightened emotions. But that voice had been used to scathe me, because he knew the lengths of the power that voice held, how much sway it owned over the climate of my mind. He'd used it to say the one thing which could destroy me in a fractured second.

Perhaps he'd seen it as a mercy; perhaps, to him, it had been a clean break. It only proved to me how meaningless all of this was to him, however—he certainly had felt nothing. He still felt nothing. He'd walked away from me and smiled sweetly at the broken-hearted mess he'd left behind.

Why can't I do the same?

Because he would always have that power over me. Maybe he hadn't meant what he said when he spoke of absolute belonging, and maybe that had been another one of his brilliant, underhanded ploys to lull me further under the promises of his deceit, but I meant what I said every time I spoke those damned three words. I would say them with reverence until the day I died, but even then, I would be holding onto what was, apparently, a facade.

Was who you were a dream, and who you are a reality?

You could tell me every day that you don't love me, and you can tell me to leave. But you can't tell me not to love the one who showed me what it meant to say those words at all.

My consciousness wasn't fully restored, but again, everything felt so real. Was I awake? Or was I suspended in an awful, whipping nightmare? I'd looked so openly into his eyes and seen without a doubt what he had done to me, what he had confessed to doing by the prompt of that other agonized voice. If this was a dream, I didn't want to let it take its course; I wanted to claw myself out of it until my nails were cracked and bleeding. I couldn't endure another moment of it.

But I didn't have anyone to pull me out of the nightmare this time. I wasn't with my lover—he was gone, and if the contents of that terrifying image held any basis in the truth, he would never come back to me.

It can't be true.

My body was a limb sack of heavy bones and unwilling life, and I couldn't move freely on whatever surface I slept over. Mentally, I begged the echoing sound of his voice to stop—it was the first time I didn't wish to hear what I'd previously associated with comfort, but only because of what that sound entailed, what it cruelly spoke to me, how my own mind tore me to shreds and acknowledged the deadening anguish without bothering to send the proper signals to my limbs in order to wake me from this hell.