It is strange to be next to the ghost of someone you loved, she thinks.
Someone you love.
Because she does, doesn’t she?
Even though she cannot find the words to say it, she knows that she does. The same way she knew when she squared off against his father as she was rended asunder. When her last words before her first death, her final thoughts, had been of his kind face and the fates she had seen pouring from those strange eyes. The same way she had known when she had faced her murderer again to come to an armistice.
When she agreed to follow his son into a war that was not her own.
(She does love him. Does. Does.)
But this Yadigar is not the same, although the melancholy strikes the same tone, and there is something strange that echoes in her chest—something like a death throe or the cry of a lark. Something that is sweet and simple and laced up in the bouquet of a funeral. It makes her throat ache with words unsaid.
“Your body is the least of you,” her voice sounds strange to her, her voice thick, her eyes stinging. She reaches down for a moment to press lips that are not her own against his draconic chest, as thought she could feel the pulse of him—find the beating heart and know that he still lives there within him.
She pauses, realizing it is the first time she has ever touched him like this and withdraws.
Not like this. Not this echo of him.
“How did you feel?”
In the before.
In the after.
In the never been.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in