Greek Tragedy ⋆ Moon Knight

𝟐𝟎. All His Loss

Without as much as another word, they run back inside and into the corridors' asylum.

The second Taweret can't hear her, Noor starts to scream. "You are not going back to Khonshu, either of you."

Steven wries his hands, almost disappearing under his sweatshirt. "Well there's no bloody other way, is there?"

"No, there's not," Marc agrees. "You have to face this."

She scoffs. "Yeah well, you're gonna have to face my dead body, because there's no other way that I'm letting you do this."

"If you want to balance your heart, you have to stop hiding from the inevitable," Steven says, eyebrows cinched together.

Noor, irritated and frustrated, rolls her eyes. "I am perfectly balanced, thank you."

"You're so far in denial you don't even notice it anymore," Zagreus tells her, crossing his arm. "I hate to make you do this, but you have to open your eyes."

She starts to backtrack, chest heaving and throat slowly tightening. "I won't go back there," she decreets. "I can't."

Her back hits a door. She feels panic rise in her as she turns around. She recognises it immediately. Broken glass, kitchen tiles. She can see a single tear run down her father's face.

She feels her shoulders shake before she even realises that she's holding back sobs.

"Don't make me do this, please," she says, talking to her father's face through the window. "I don't want to."

She feels small – frighteningly so, and she's not even in the room yet. She's not even facing him yet.

Zagreus, in all his time with her, watching her and helping her through panic attacks, has never seen her so scared. She knows exactly what she has to face.

She turns back to them, with poorly hidden tears, chin wobbling. "It's more than I can bear," she tells them, rubbing the tattoo on her wrist. "If I go in there, it's going to kill me again."

If Zagreus' sheer look of shock could rival Steven's pity, it's nothing compared to the endless compassion she can see in Marc's eyes.

He walks up to her, and takes her hand, slowly bringing it to his face. He kisses the inside of her wrist, and puts her hand on the handle of the door. "It's your choice," he tells her, as if her feelings mattered more than the deaths of thousands. "Only yours."

She looks up in his dark eyes, before dropping her head, leaning her forehead against his chin as he kisses her forehead. She's not a hero. She never has been. If she could, she'd run away from here. But there's nothing she wouldn't do for her people.

She inhales sharply, and looks back at the door. "Help me," she asks, voice shaking but loud.

Marc's hand is on hers in a heartbeat, and she can feel Steven rub her back. Zagreus is right behind her as he kisses the top of her head.

She turns the handle.

It's silent. Anyone would have expected an abusive household to be loud, filled with screams, but the worst part was always the silence. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her dad to start yelling over anything.

"It had been bad, the week leading up to this," she tells them quietly, as if her father could hear. "He didn't have full custody of me yet, so it was supposed to be a month of vacation at his house during the summer break. A week in, and I just couldn't take it anymore."

The yelling, the remarks on her personality, on her body. Saying that she owed everything to him, that she was insufferable, and kissing her cheek and laughing with her the next second. She couldn't do this any longer.