“I couldn’t leave without you.”
He could though, couldn’t he? He could, because despite a warm familiarity that lingers there in the dark of his eyes they are only strangers; he owes nothing to her for stumbling across him in the darkness, as though he were a lighthouse and she was lost at sea. He could, because in this new world that still looks like the old one strangers don’t give each other anything except for sickness.
He tells her he can’t run. He tells her that he knows that there are safe havens (and somehow, for some reason, she doesn’t question how he knows — it just makes sense). He asks her to run with him and save the world, and while Eilidh admires him for his own unique perfection, how his heart is as kind and pure as his face is beautiful, she doesn’t have it in her to pretend.
Eilidh knows better than anyone that not everyone can always be helped.
“Why are you here?”
And all it takes is only four words, and four syllables, to bring her back to autumn. She doesn’t even notice what he asks her next because all that she can hear is the gentle shake of hardened leaves as the rattle and fall from the boughs of a tree that exists only in her memories, a tree that looks like it might be on fire for all the colour that it carries. He might notice her eyes glazing, or it might be too dark to see how vacant they become when all she sees is the way the sunlight refracted then off the dew in the long, meadow grass and shone it gold. She can still smell the tangle of his sweat mixed with earthy decay.
(Tell me, Eilidh. Why are you still here?)
There are parts of her that fear the answer, too.
She draws herself back into the present again, but doesn’t know if she can bring herself to tell him the answer out loud. It wasn’t always so difficult. That day in the autumn under the violent red boughs of a maple tree where they had lain side-by-side against the earth with the dappled light to warm their skin, it was almost easy.
“I don’t know if I want to be saved.”
And there it is, the confession she hasn’t been bold enough to even admit to herself, even silently inside the safety of her own skin. She’d made excuses. She’d crafted careful metaphors using ghosts, and haunts, and cities, and stars — but they were all lies.
So, here it is, laid bare: her truth.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Tiphon]