They chase the night together, weaving through the tangled branches of trees left sagging under the weight of snow as though they’ve always done it. For some leg of the journey she takes the lead, glancing across her shoulders now and then to find the light hitting the tops of her cheekbone and assuring her that he is still real and not a figment of her own exhausted imagination. It’s good that here and there the shadows fall across his face and disguise his expressions, that way she doesn’t see the war she’s begun inside his bones.
Because if it’s possible for words to become swords with sharp and steely edges, then it’s possible that she herself has become a warrior, or a gladiator, because there are so many wounds that she leaves on his skin where there should only be sentences.
She thinks that they are done talking salvation, but it is still bubbling under the surface of his skin unseen because the way he says her name as they are walking makes him an artist in her eyes; how he draws out the shapes of each letter across his tongue until what comes together is a masterpiece. He tells her it’s a beautiful name, and she thinks that it must be if he decides it. He should know, shouldn’t he?
“I’m Tiphon.”
She doesn’t speak when he offers his own, not to taste the syllables of it, or drink down the sound of it like wine though there are parts of her that reason to. She keeps it safe regardless, tucked neatly in the plot of empty land between the things that are special to her and the things that don’t make sense. Tiphon.
A light in the darkness.
And then he asks her why she wants to stay, as though shrouded in the contagion he can’t see the beauty of midnight in the meadow; how time seems to stand still, how even the crickets could find peace here. The answer is easy. Moselle. It comes, her name, to sit anxious on her tongue before she knows that swallowing it down is even an option.
“It means light,” she confesses in the dark, referring to her name and full of truths tonight. She doesn’t tell him about the way that her mother’s eyes had softened every time she had ever spoken it out loud, as though reminded of a promise she should never forget. “My mother is here,” she says before she can stop herself, but she doesn’t say that she exists now in a shallow grave beneath a mountain of earth that Eilidh herself had moved for her; she doesn’t say that she is bones and dirt.
“She’s all that’s ever felt like home to me. If I leave I’m just left to listen to my heart calling me back.”
Then the slow trickle of water comes from nowhere, and the world opens up for the river before them. She pauses on the bank, her muscles wound like tightly coiled springs and here and there they flinch under her skin and betray her hesitation. She meets his eyes then, turning her cheek again to find his light.
“Do you know what that’s like?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Tiphon]