07-28-2016, 05:22 PM
tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us;
She knows that by doing this she is defying things – defying death, which has long clawed at her, defying Beqanna, which had seen fit to lock her in the afterlife, dead and not-dead. More, she is defying him, and she is sure the retribution will come, but these are not thoughts she allows herself.
Today, alive, she is reckless.
All the caution in the world couldn’t have kept her from him, anyway, a feeling that redoubles, triples inside her under the way his eyes go light at the sight of her, like she is a thing to be beheld.
She slips into his embrace and it’s so much more than anything she can recall, here with the fecund earth around them and hearts beating as they’re supposed to.
Here, no one’s dead.
She touches him, her own lips yielding to the solid muscle of him, a feeling she delights in. She tastes sweat and salt on his coat, tastes life, and it’s such a minute thing but it brings her close to tears.
She’s spent so much time being dead that life is almost too much for her
Almost.
“It’s not forever,” she says, “I had help, and I don’t know how long she can hold back…”
Hold back what? The shadow of death that cloaks her, suffocates her, the one that imbues her with power and strangles her all at once. She’s almost amazed it’s been this long.
“It feels so much better than I remember,” she says. She had never been a lively woman, certain the woman she’d once been had never smiled like this, had never marveled so at the sky. The woman she had been – the live Gail – had been a rather macabre thing, enchanted with death and disaster, who had died willingly, once.
“You forget,” she says, and her voice goes softer, “what it’s like. The sights, the smells, the way the ground feels. And colors! God, Ramiel. I missed color.”
She’s not even speaking of rainbows, merely of the rich greens and browns of the earth, the occasional splash of color from flowers. Nature, as it’s meant to be seen.
“Everything’s so alive,” she breathes, “especially you.”
She doesn’t leave his side. She can’t stop touching him, convincing herself this is real.
And in answer to his question, she merely says, “everything I possibly can.”
In that, of course, is another question – for she does not know what this body is capable of, if it could even conceive children, much less bear them. But ah, she had always loved being a mother.
Gail