hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Her loneliness was exquisite. She felt it in the blister of pain beneath skin stretched too thin, too tight, of broken bones and spilled marrow. When her heart beat in her chest it was echoed by hurt, etched in a beautiful desolation she refused to let end. So many times she had gone back to the place in the meadow, their place, so many times both relieved and undone to find that he was not there waiting. There was a part of her, a broken, wretched sliver of a selfish heart that had wanted him to know the same ache she had come to know, like a second heart beating in her chest. But mostly, mostly she was glad. Leaving had been impossible, like carving joints out of stone and steel and even after she had gone there had been a strange urgency pushing her back. She did her best to ignore it. She had known that if he had been there waiting, if she had seen those same red eyes on the dark of his quiet face she would not have been able to leave again.
With time she began to avoid the meadow altogether, as if somehow this would start to erase the memory of him. It would be easier to forget, to steel her heart against the thoughts that began to trickle in, dangerous, ruinous thoughts of a home and a family, of someone who might worry when the sun came up and Isle was not sleeping beneath it. But it was hard to go back to before, hard to forget a thought that had worn a path in her mind for all the times she had drawn it forward. The only progress she made was in the lies she told herself, in the time spent convincing herself that this solitude was everything. That it was the only thing for such a brittle, wretched creature like herself.
She stood deep in the forest, the sharp bone of her hip pressed into the bark of the tree against which she leaned. She did not need to see the clouds in the sky, the heaviness of swollen steel bellies, to know that it would be raining soon. Nor was she surprised when the first rumbles of thunder cracked the sky open and left the ground purring beneath her heels. She was already buried beneath the trees, tucked away from the sky and the storm, but not from the fat drops of rain that dripped down her sides to follow the valleys between ribs that stood out more than they had a few weeks ago.
As the storm raged on she could feel something building in her belly, an anguish pent up and ignored for too long and it thrashed wild inside her. Like a star in its death throes, she imploded. Everything she felt, even what she had chosen to deny, it poured out of her all at once and her mind touched everything that had decided to shelter beneath the trees of the forest. Her stomach clenched and she curled in on herself, bracing for the torrent of thoughts that raced back to her on fading pathways. She closed her eyes and her mouth tightened and all of that frustration still ached in her chest like broken glass beneath her skin.
And then one word, one silly, stupid word caught like a stone in her throat and she could not swallow it away.
Isle.
The devastation she felt was immediate, that urgency she had known so long ago instantly returned and she could not have stopped herself if she tried as she turned and disappeared into a different part of the forest. Her heart clenched, it ached and throbbed and battered a hole in her chest and she willed it to stop just long enough for her to think. But thought was unwelcome here. Thought, reasoning, had ruled her in the months recently passed. She slipped easily through the trees, the storm all but forgotten when at last a flash of gold and fuchsia revealed a very familiar silhouette buried beneath a thicket. She froze immediately, those dark eyes wide and wild as they sought out his face from the rest of the shadow that shrouded him. “Offspring.” She breathed, inching no closer despite that the distance between them felt as though it was measured in miles by the pounding of her heart. “I heard you.” Her voice was little more than a shattered whisper as she stood before him, soaked and thin, with rain trailing like tears between the shallow of her ribs.
Isle
