to ascend you must die ( you must be crucified );

[bolstered]

The body they carry from the throne room is one they all bear the weight of, even if it's the largest ( and arguably strongest ) of them that holds it close against his chest — him, not it — much like this image right here, with a gloved hand at his knee and another stroking through the dark ends of his hair. There have been times before that he's been informed of his peripheral awareness lacking, in a sense, and this is not much different than any time before, unless one takes into account that he should be dead.

Was, for the proper tense. He had been dead. And while the whole of him has yet to come around to the thought that it isn't anymore, his mind is a slowly-spinning carousel of what and how and why and every single question he might have found himself asking in the span of a lifetime, without much hope of an answer, at least in that very moment just because they're still in his head head, muddied and mixed in with everything else that he's still trying to make sense of, and the most that he can grasp is quite possibly the simplest thing.

I was dead, he thinks, and a tiny muscle at the corner of his mouth twitches. Whether in recognition or that pressing need to come back to full awareness is anyone's guess — but it's there, and it's something. I was dead, and now I'm not.

Relatively speaking, of course. For now.

That first twitch of muscle isn't the only one, though it is the most noticeable in those first few, long moments; there's a small, near-inaudible breath taken in and held, almost like his lungs have forgotten how to expand even in such a short span of time, and while they don't yet burn with the need to release what they've taken in, it's still a bit longer than it otherwise would have been for that same breath to give to exhale, slow, soft, still so quiet that only one that has been attuned to every part of his being from the tender age of six years would pick up on it —

If he does. If that hand on his knee moves even a fraction to indicate that he's heard it, time will tell, because by the gods they have a long way back to. Wherever it is they're going. ( Hammerhead? Lestallum? Where does one take the body of one's king, when his own throne is no longer fit to hold him? )

His throat is dry. His chest aches. The fingers of the hand that rest against the point at which his body bends in Gladio's arms give the smallest bit of movement, more like the waking of nerves after a long expanse of dormancy; his left arm hangs limp, swaying almost gently with the fall of each footstep, and it might be a moment before his eyes crack open, but when they do, the night still remains heavy around them, still thick, but … maybe not quite as ominous.

( Another breath. This one, a bit deeper, this one given to exhale a bit more normally than the one that had come before it, and it's in that moment that he chances a clearing of his throat, voice cracking and breaking even before he tries to open his mouth, but at the very same time as that one hand that has found movement again reaches for the fingers curled against his knee. )

It's a subtle thing, a soft thing, a just-between-them thing that could have probably spanned miles — but there it is, the brush of a fingertip over the back of a knuckle, and even if his voice is in shards, splinters, it doesn't keep him from what they might all expect from him.

"… Hope you haven't already gotten the funeral planned." I was dead. "At least let me write my own eulogy."

I was dead, and now I'm not.