Post-Richard’s demise days had split into two categories like sides of a fairytale: the good and the bad.

There were good days.

And then there were bad ones.

Death was a wound that was concealed beneath the rough skin which stubbed over the wound, harsh and crusted and stable, but it still stung on bad days.

Nightmares frequented Carvel on those. It was in the deep ache of his bones and in the spiral of his mind and in his pearl grey eyes tinted with the purple splotches of Dionysian frenzy more often that not, and he mourned and mourned and mourned without and end. You knew that he replayed the moment in his mind, that horrible silence of the previous year where everything had stilled, slowed to a halt, and then he felt it, the snap, the cut of a soul string, and then he rushed out, and then the telegram came; Richard Courant was dead.

And it was as if he had taken the life out of everyone else with him to the grave: sucked out the sun, derived them of their spark and gleam of complacent eyes. How others were holding up, you did not know; Carvel teetered on a thin line above the vast expanse of a canyon, constantly toeing the border between artfully twisting in mockery at the darkness below and tipping over, arms flailing, into the black maw of the void.

His tortuous mind had taken a liking to the Portbury docks; he was here, again, in the godly hour of the day, as quiet and still as a statue save for the smoke that wafted heavenwards from the flaming red tip of his cigarette.

At last, he animated when you have made your presence known; akin to the grimace that crawled upon your features when you’ve noticed the glass in his hand that made itself a recurring guest in the past few days. “Darkness flooding my mind,” he voiced his complaints, a mellow sigh escaping as he rested the dark crown of his head on the junction of your shoulder, inky curls a soft curtain neatly tucked under your chin. “For the first time, I do not know how to fight it.”