Eilidh doesn’t find her feet when he drops an anchor next to her. Instead, she leans her head back down into the morning mist and feels it cushioned by the golden grass as she observes, with a dazed interest, a small mound of churned earth that the ants must have dutifully forged in the summer to mask their subterranean cities (cities fueled by the scraps of creatures oh, so much bigger than they). At first she doesn’t feel the melancholy creeping in as she wonders if Moselle has forged cities not unlike these beneath her own mound of churned earth. Maybe there was no decay at all; no bones curled in on themselves in broken ways, lost without the flesh and sinew that held them once.
Maybe all that there was now beneath the wildflowers and the dirt were cities paved with starlight, and maybe, if she stays this still with her ears pressed against the earth forever she’ll get to hear her mother sing even just one more time.
Perhaps she should be less vulnerable in the company of strangers (instead of strewn out naked before them, all the softest parts of her flesh exposed), but fear is something Eilidh has harboured no room for since the last time. In spite of a haunting past, she surrendered quickly to the notion that her time will come when it comes, just like it does for everyone else. And if it’s here, tangled in the long grass with the dappled sunlight on her skin while she dreams about cities lost like Atlantis, then she can think of worse ways to leave.
She went in worse ways.
“Everything is different, but it will always be the same.” He says, and she doesn’t say it, but her heart quietly agrees.
And at last, when she is ready to leave her thoughts on the anthill (another scrap to fuel them, maybe) she looks up at him from the bottom of her dark eyelashes without lifting her face. Eilidh follows his amber eyes to the horizon, but she doesn’t ask him what he is searching for knotted there between the sunlight and the trees; everyone has ghosts. When she looks at him again she decides in the moment that he is striking, in strange and untouchable ways. Scars and divots carved into his flesh let his body tell a story with his most important parts underlined, and it makes her want to know him. It makes her want to reach out with her lips and touch his skin like she can solve his existence if she can only read his body like braille.
Because he looks as though he has seen bigger things than this meadow.
Because he looks as though he’s seen the universe enough times to map out the distance between the constellations.
Because he, with his laughter and the way that he grins like he knows what he is doing - like he’s done it a thousand times before to a thousand faces more beautiful than her own - feels like a light in the darkness. If she knew that he could see inside of her like she was translucent, read her like a book and dog ear all of his favourite pages, she might have felt differently.
“It is good to be home.” He says.
“Welcome home, then,” she answers, warmly, like they are not strangers at all - like he has been lost at sea and has finally come back to her - like she has been missing him all her life. Like it’s rational to associate one foreign laugh, and one glimpse of life without sorrow, all to one stranger.
“I’m Eilidh. Were you gone long?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Set]