A cold wind skirts the meadows softly tree-lined edges.
On its journey through the newly greened branches of oaks it finds her, too, every facet of her quaking body as she writhes against its still-wintery jaws. The truth is that she hasn’t felt real warmth in what had seemed like eons.
Sometimes she thinks about the last time, about the warm autumn sun that filtered in through the eyelets of the leaves and left her body dappled by the shade of a red maple tree’s heavy boughs. There in the long grass, daydreaming about subterranean cities forged by the ghosts of people she’s loved, was one of the last times she’d felt anything at all.
She’s there in the meadow when the last fragments of light leave the sky, when the blue drowns the last colours of sunlight like the sky itself is an ocean. The clouds roll in then, leave the night as empty and light-less as she feels in these moments.
What stands here now, huddled in the thorny branches of a leaning hawthorn shrub, isn’t Eilidh.
A constellation of dried blood outlines the places he had touched her, like pins in a map; in the sunlight he began at the fall of her hip, and by evening, with hours of miles clocked, he sank into the soft flesh of her neck. Once she had been beautiful like her mother, with soft eyes and gentle curves instead of harsh angles; she is altogether different here, nothing soft left of her as her ribs and hips jut out where they shouldn’t, and with her dark eyes leaking rivers of matted hair down the planes of her face.
The sickness had ravaged her, certainly, but beyond it still it was the misery that ruined her, that sunk in to her cells far deeper than the disease ever could.
She wants to die.
She wants one thing left to her that is easy.
(“I wonder what they’d say to us right now.”)
She thinks of a different him entirely, then, lets a single fragile smile find her lips at Leander’s memory. Back then she had told him that her mother would have told her to find her light in the darkness, but now she isn’t so sure.
Maybe, instead, Moselle would call her home.
Maybe, instead, she would have mercy.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Colby]