Title: Beauty and the Blankness
Rating: PG
Warnings/Content: Dread, friendship, comfort. Supposition as to the malignance of the castle itself.
Prompt: Aug 17, Ico, Ico/Yorda, awe - she was so beautiful
A/N: "Awe: a feeling of fear and reverence; a feeling of amazement; to inspire fear and reverence; to control by inspiring dread."
Summary: Ico fights against the futility, the weight of the castle set full against him. He cannot help what he is. By Yorda's light, the shadow he casts is horned.

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Ico knew the castle was as much a prison as Yorda's hanging birdcage had been. He led her through it by her hand, tugging when she lagged behind. To be still would have been to surrender.

It frightened him to look at Yorda. He expected to see through her: she could have been formed of sunlight sparkling on dust, held together by a dream. He loved her so naturally, when nothing in his life had been natural or lovely.

He was afraid that he would reach out and find her gone.

.

Yorda was afraid of the shadows. Ico fought the shadows where she would not. He fought, not because she was beautiful, or afraid, but because she was resigned.

To witness resignation made Ico burn like his own bonfire. He would remember how, at the moment of his birth, his fate had been fixed, his horned crown making of his mother’s flesh a desecration. All his life should have been nothing but dust and despair; his life was dust, without even the light of day to make the motes sparkle.

Ico fought against resignation. The rebound of his stick, his sword, resounded through him like a chord.

.

The shadows would come in such numbers Ico could not count. He had a stick; they carried fear, which caused more damage than insubstantial claws.

Terror lashed at Ico, threw him back against cold castle stone. He thought the same thoughts, because he was the same boy even when afraid; he thought of resignation and of his fate, yet through terror’s looking glass he saw his own dark shadow.

Shadowed arms pinched closed around Yorda’s white waist, bars of a tight-built cage. Ico saw no nightmare, only felt a guilty relief that flattened him to the floor, the weight of the castle overhead sealing his tomb. Yorda would walk by, move into her fated future, and be gone.

The taste of his tears refreshed his veins. Salt like blood, blood like life. Ico pried himself free of the castle floor with his stick, and fought for Yorda’s freedom.

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Drifting, never quite asleep, shadow’s cold seed of terror would lengthen its root. Unthinking, unfathomable, the castle closed its gates around Ico’s mind. Ico should not fight for Yorda, she was too beautiful, she was not for him. He should let her go. His struggle on her behalf was as vain as the one that broke him from his coffin. This whole castle was nothing more than a larger grave; he would die.

Ico knew, gut-knowledge and mind-knowledge both, that Yorda was not of his substance. He had no right to hold her hand.

Light and the shadow. Yorda and the dark beasts. Beauty and the blankness. Ico was of neither.

Awake, Ico remembered only his sleep, but he wondered. The shadows could not harm him, and he could not harm the shadows. He wondered if they were not monsters, but merely Yorda’s brothers, come to claim their rightful prize.

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Ico tried to imagine he could hear the sound of Yorda’s heart beating. She was so silent, so still. He crouched and crawled, coaxed her to climb, but when he turned his back and back again, she would be gone.

Why are you not here?

He yelled for her. Panic, worry; but she would always come running. His eyes touched her, rested, relieved. To him her eyes would turn.

She was as substantial as a flame in daylight. When Yorda looked at him, Ico’s cheeks would warm.

.

Into every fight, Ico carried, like a threatened thing, his soul as a weapon. It was only the struggle that drove away the shadows, his struggle, and so Ico fought for his fate and for Yorda’s. All his life he had struggled; the castle would not change him.

The shadows would taunt, break and beckon, change and elude; and Yorda would be gone from where he had tried to guard her. The shadows would tell him that Yorda had run from him deliberately, that she wanted to get away.

Never, Ico told the shadows, never gone away!

Yorda cried out with such a quiet voice. Ico could barely hear her over the sound of his own wretched gasping, but at that soft sound, Ico would remember this: Yorda gave voice with the same air that he breathed. They were one of a kind. If she died, he would die too.

She was beautiful, but she was real. When Yorda slept, it was with her head on his shoulder, and Ico could feel her breath, warm, tickling. They both shared sound, breath, and this castle. His coffin. Her cage. And this: her smile as she woke, her fingers woven through his own.

Her soft voice. Her breath. The suggestion of life wrought in sound. Ico found himself wondering if Yorda could sing.

The shadows would go. Yorda would chase birds, and look at the sky, and laugh.

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