And maybe it’s mercy, or at least a form of it, that finds her next.
Because a gentle touch that grazes her left shoulder turns Eilidh’s cheek towards a stranger she’s never known but plays a role in her history, her making, regardless of her knowledge of it; a being who is not Moselle, but at least one who had perhaps once known the freckles across her cheeks, or the softness of her eyes, or the kindness of her heart, or maybe even, that she loved the stars — at least one who had perhaps once known all the reasons that her memory would still be worth dying for.
If she only knew.
Instead though they are perfect strangers, made obvious by the soft gasp to claw it’s way out of Eilidh’s gently parted lips at the rather garish sight of her. It’s obvious that she’s sick by the ways that her temples have sunk into her skull, and the blood that leaks from her nose that mirrors her own. Her eyes are only painfully empty sockets, as hollowed out as the rest of her — and even still, Eilidh follows the ogee curve of her face, pale and otherworldly with violent red splattered across her cheekbones and lips, and decides that in another lifetime she was beautiful, too.
The world had not been kind to either of them.
“You shouldn’t be alone in the cold,” says the stranger, as though the cold is what will finally end them both — not the disease, not the monsters they have known, not the misery. She almost laughs aloud at the irony, but instead shrinks back against the thorns she’s made a home from as though she’s suddenly afraid to be peeled out of the bramble and back into the night, as though the act alone would renew her in a way she isn’t yet ready for.
“There are worse things,” Eilidh muses aloud, a gentle smile curving her lips — because even here, even like this, dying and desolate, she is still a gentle thing.
“I think you know it, too.” Of course she did. Each scar that mars her once-pretty face was one worse thing, wasn’t it?
“My name is Eilidh,” she says, wondering then if this sightless stranger will be the last to know — the last one that she tells. There is a simple beauty to the realisation that this interaction is potentially the last. The air seems fresher, like she can taste the spring and the new river run off in every breath. Like the meadow, in spite of the night, is sharper. If this is the last, she thinks, she is ready for it.
“Who are you?”
Maybe she would be the last to know, too.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Ryatah]