He has never had to mourn her the way that she has had to mourn him.
His grief was always a different kind of a beast. It was brutal and raw and gnawing, but in the same breath, it was experienced through a fog. It was felt though a veil and it was not able to pierce him in the same way that pain can pierce the living. He was able to mourn her from his death, long for her from the afterlife, but he was always given the option of the fade—of the darkness, of the shadows.
Still, this does not dampen his joy in the reunion. In the moments they reclaim.
Her voice cracks over his name and he can just kiss her in response, pressing his lips to the dip of her jaw in some kind of reassurance that he is real, that this is real, that it wasn’t going to fade into forever.
“You are brimming with life,” he laughs, his kind eyes studying her, seeing everything that still lives there within her. The courage and the heart and the soul that had loved their children so fiercely, that had done everything within its power to protect the Gates. She had been a wonder during his first life—a miracle.
He is so relieved to know that nothing has changed.
That she stands before him nothing short of miraculous.
“We should run,” he says suddenly, turning his amber gaze to the horizon before bringing it back to her, his lips spreading into a wide grin. “We should run. Be alive. Marvel in it.” He takes a few dancing steps back, nodding in encouragement, as if crooking a finger in her direction. “Don’t you think?”
His wings flare slightly before they fold over his back.
“I’ve flown. Now I think that I should run.”
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to