Eilidh hopes that he is breathing, but she had heard the wheezing that came from the copse and steadies herself to learn an she might not like. It was hard to see him before, and when she’d called out into the night she hadn’t been entirely certain she wasn’t only asking the shadows, but a single, silvery veil of moonlight reaches down through the night then and a halo of light illuminates him.
Eilidh sees then that he is beautiful instead of sick.
“A light in the darkness,” she whispers again into the night, clutching these five words like a prayer. He reminds her of a beacon, white and gold with gently feathered wings, and for a moment she quietly wonders if death can really come so easy — if he is here for her, to call her back home to the stars. If Moselle has sent him.
She would leave before her next breath if it were true.
“I think so,” comes his answer, though not entirely confidently.
“What about you? Are you real?”
When she looks up to meet his gaze, Eilidh tilts her head to the left ever-so-slightly in contemplation. If he had asked her before the moon had taken it upon itself to cradle his face in the palm of its silvery hand, she would have answered: "Yes". Now she isn’t sure. Maybe she isn’t real. Maybe the sickness has already taken her. Maybe she’s translucent, floating outside of a corpse she does not notice, nothing but a ghost destined to haunt this same meadow, again and again and again, until she dissipates into the river and its mist.
Would it be so bad?
But he moves forward like he knows her, and ascertains that she is anyways when he touches her. She almost winces. It’s been so long since she’s felt someone else against her skin, and it ignites a coalition under her skin that protests for more; she almost steps into it, into him — like please, save me. Of course she looks at him delicately; nothing about her is strong — not her small, waiflike body, not her fragile bones or bleeding heart. That’s why she is here in this meadow. That’s why she has chosen death, again and again and again.
“You’re real,” he breathes.
Painfully so, she is reminded.
The stars have never felt so far before.
“What happened?”
It is her mother’s soft, dark eyes that look up at him in these moments. So much of her had belonged to Moselle first; her lips, her skin, her dreams. How does she translate into words all the terrible ways this world is ending? How does she look into his beautiful face and not see disease creeping in to ruin it? How can she express that the danger now is all around them, that it lies in wait between the molecules and next to the atoms of everything?
It would be easier to say His name, but she can’t bring herself to conjure even the letters of it. Somehow she knows who is behind it, even without witnessing it, even without being told — like he had breathed life into some dark mark bred inside her bones (the only thing her father ever gave her) the day he had come for her mother; the day that she had buried her in the earth.
“You have to go,” she cannot say ‘we’ — not when she has stopped shoulder-deep in the river water a thousand times before this.
“Everyone is sick. Everyone is dying.”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Tiphon]