After Midnight. [closed]

[Armandeus]

He waits until after Midnight to break down. To a time when nobody's around and the duties of the day are forgotten. A time when he can let go of the flood of emotions that threaten to overwhelm and down him his own misery.

There is a lot of pressure on him. Pressure that has nothing to do with visions or headaches or cooking for an Inn-full of people. It's the stuff that comes in nightmares. In dreams when his mind lets his guard down and opens to the horrors that await him.

In dreams there is chaos, absolute and complete. It’s a torrent of faces and voices and there's barely any room to make sense of it all, but always, always one face rises out of the storm above it all. It's this face that haunts him; the way the frozen red eyes stare at him lifelessly, reflecting his own feverish horror-struck green ones back at him. It's an image that eats at his very soul and dear Eru, how he would give anything to be rid of it.

It's this parasitic memory that puts the fear in him. Fear to have everything perfect, as if that will somehow help erase his past misdoings. So he cooks and cleans and puts on the face of a happy-go-lucky jester to hide his pain and make it through the day. It works until evening comes. Then the pressure he creates himself to be perfect wanes and he struggles through his evening duties until finally, blissfully, everyone has gone for the day.

He goes too, but unlike the others, it is not to bed. At the far end of the garden stands a large tree, nearly invisible to the Inn itself thanks to the growth between them. It is utterly perfect. This is where he goes, climbing high into the branches until he disappears within the tree himself. It is here that he lets himself fall apart, to cry and sob and shake until he simply can't anymore. It's like letting the air out of an overfilled balloon and he crumples as the tears turn into a trickle and the sobs calm enough for him to breathe normally. This outpouring leaves him utterly drained, to the point of not moving, but that's okay because he needs it. Without this he fears what would happen. Contained, this pressure scares him, more so the thought of what it could do if combined with the elemental power he already holds a strained leash upon.

So for now he takes a small measure of peace from the drained moments of afterwards, hidden away in his secret tree in the darkness. Peace in knowing that if he can just get through another day, after Midnight things will be better and he will be able to make it through another day.