Of course it’s too soon.
Of course it’s too bold a statement to lay on the shoulders of a stranger.
She isn’t certain why she’s said it at all, why today, wrapped in moonlight with him is the time to let truth spill out between her teeth and through her soft lips — enough of it to drown him with.. Eilidh regrets it almost instantly, because she can almost feel the ways that she wounds him, so evident and marked is the pain expressed through the lines of his face.
For a long while a silence settles between them, marred only by distant hacks and groans; the sick.
“Maybe you just don’t know yet that you want to escape, that you actually don’t want to stay here.”
He wants to believe she is something that she isn’t — strong enough. The truth is that now, with those caged words finally free and in flight, she has never been so sure of anything. Why else would she meet the river, again and again and again, and never cross it?
Likely, it is too late for her anyways.
Likely, the sickness already has her.
But maybe it isn’t for him.
“You’re right, of course,” she says, with the gentle shake of her head as though she means to snap herself out of this wrongful conclusion when she is only really lying through her teeth. He is too beautiful, too simple and pure to be swallowed by this; her light in the darkness. He could be saved, at least.
Maybe she could do this one last thing.
“The river is this way,” she moves to step around him, pointing with her nose through the path just beyond them that weaves haphazardly through the night. She can almost hear the water already, the soft trickle of its movement over rocks and around gently expanding fragments of ice that look more like shards of glass; a symbol of peace amidst the calamity of the contagion.
And though the night is well upon them, though it holds everything — ground, sky, landmarks — cradled in its soft, velvet arms, she turns down the shrouded path towards the river.
Eilidh would know the way with her eyes closed by now.
“My name is Eilidh. Who are you?”
Or what, are you?
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Tiphon] This post brought to you by fever, so apologies if it doesn't make any sense.