[private] roll the bones; yadigar

[breach]

BREACH

I'd bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there
I'm too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book

He feels like an endless, yawning canyon. Split open and emptied, carved out by eons of the river’s relentless thrumming. It causes a ringing in her ears that is nearly deafening. A keening cry that nearly breaks her, shatters her against the shore more than the blast had done in Nerine. She closes her eyes tight against it and shudders slightly, focuses on the way that his lips feel as it traces up the ridges of her spine.

It’s enough, she reminds herself.

She has told herself that this is enough.

It would be.

His compliment falls on deadened ears. She has never wanted to be beautiful. She has never hungered for simple beauty, lest he mean the beautiful way of a predator stalking prey. She had always loved that beauty the most. The way her mother had looked just before the kill—her coat bunching, muscles coiling right before she sprung. The wilderness in her mother’s gaze. The refined power of her father’s gift.

That was the beauty that spoke to her.

Not the marbling of her legs or the blue sheen of her coat.

But she accepts it with a hum. Takes the scraps that he can offer her and hoards them away as though another may never come again. Because she knows that they never will. This will be the all of it.

“I would make you a bird,” she whispers, recalling their first meeting.

“I would make us both birds and we would fly away.”

Into the yonder. Into the wild. Into the places where even this nothingness could not touch them.

so take all the wind from my lungs if you're out of air
just deliver me truth, deliver me you