hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
For days. He says, and for a moment she can only look on at him uncertainly. It seemed wholly impossible, completely unbelievable, that he had felt her in his veins the way she had felt him. Like a poison, a parasite, a fever burning away all coherent thought and reason until there was only heart left. Only instinct. But her dark eyes lift to his face and she can feel the sincerity burning there, bright and honest. Her mouth sinks at the corners, pulled down by the weight of the frown flattening itself across her whiskered lips. “I didn’t go back right away.” She tells him quietly, understanding, and her lips return to a spot above the corner of his mouth, a hollow carved perfectly for her. “I waited. I thought maybe I could forget about you.” She tips her head imploringly, the expression softening with the way her brow furrowed beneath the dark tangles of her forelock. Even now her chest tightens and her heart thrashes within at the very notion of forgetting him. “It turns out that’s a lot harder to do than you would expect.” Her voice is lighter now, soft to match the smile sitting in her wild brown eyes, a smile that traced down along her jaw and etched itself across her dark mouth. ”It was impossible.” She isn’t sure how he is doing it, but she can feel herself thawing to the sound of his humming voice and the heat of his mouth coaxing shivers from her skin.
He shifts and she cannot see his face anymore, but his mouth against her spine keeps her from protesting. It is both foreign and frightening how whole she feels in this moment, so unlike the broken creature she had always known herself to be. In this moment she can forget the way her mind wanders, the way it swallows darkness and sorrow and breeds grief beneath her skin, a grief that is not hers but that she can feel as keenly as any wound. But with him the world feels smaller, quieter, she does not worry about falling away into the sky to be consumed by the cold fire of stars. He shifts again, this time to pull her close against his chest and she can feel the flutter of wings in her heart, her veins, and every part of her belongs to him. Never has she felt so wanted, never so needed as she feels with his neck draped across her withers and his lips teasing the strands of dark mane along the crest of her neck. “If this is a dream, I want to live in it forever.” She shifts in his embrace, turning to trace the thin white scars on his shoulder with the soft of her dark velvet mouth.
And then-
“Never?” She whispers softly in a voice that almost teases, and if only she knew, if only she knew, it is in the way a blade teases the skin before it buries itself there, “never is an awfully long time, Offspring.” She shrugs a little deeper into his chest, into this embrace that made her skin feel electric and her heart so wonderfully alive in her chest. “Offspring, I have no desire to leave you.” She promises, but there is a frown of concern bleeding through the quiet of her delicate face. She can feel the first fissures of doubt racing across her heart like lightning shattering a night sky, each crack full of ice and stone and a fear that bleeds cold in her veins. “I want things with you that I have no right wanting.” Her chest must have caved in a little because she exhales sharply with the weight of the confession on her lips. “If this is a dream, I hope I never wake up.”
Isle
