He has made the river itself his home, despite that he is not made to last beneath its waters. It is the way it sounds, the way it drowns out the song of death and dying so long as he stays by its side. It is the way it always smells cold and fresh, reminds him of open skies and mountain peaks and things that feel just like freedom. It is the way he can lose himself in it, and the way it always changes, always takes him somewhere new. It is never stagnant, though so much of this world is now.
He misses the sun. He misses the light and the warmth, misses Spring because this is not that. This is bleak and brown and murky, there is no new life to find when everything is so busy just trying not to die. He misses mornings and sunrises, misses evenings and sunsets. He misses the stars and constellations for which he has no names, but certainly vows now to learn them. If they ever come back. But he isn’t sure he has it in him to miss the moon, because that halo in the sky is like two crescents pieced together and he wonders if it is the moon that watches them all suffer below.
But he is not someone made for resentment, and even this small shard of it sits ill inside his chest, so he forces his thoughts away from it lest it fester and make him rotten inside. Instead he moves to the water, drinking from it quietly and completely unaware of the company he holds until he lifts his head again and spies a girl on the bank opposite him.
“Oh,” he says, the words as reflexive as the crooked smile tugging at the corners of his dark mouth, “you know, I’ve had dreams like this before.” His smile is something more now, reaching all the way up to the warm honey of his eyes as he wades in up to his chest and stops again, studying her in a gentle way. “But I certainly do not recall falling asleep.” Yet there is something incredibly unreal about a girl in the river with skin that reminds him of a midnight sky all strewn with stars that almost seem like they are shining. It is too dark to see anything in any real detail, but the river is the only place that seems to catch any light - something he had thought was singularly unique, until now.
“My name is Web.” He says quietly, though his eyes have wandered to the shape of the wings at her shoulders that he is only now just realizing tremble like the surface of the river, like water. “I cannot decide if you are a fever dream, or something else entirely,” an amused smile, warm across the gold and navy of his face and growing because he can see the faint shifting of color around her now, an aura that means she is as alive as he is, “though I am most certainly feeling weak in the knees.” A laugh, though he half turns his face away from her so she cannot see that glimpse of pain that lances through his chest. This lightness felt wrong in a ruined world. “Would you like some company?”
WEB
@[The Monsters] please mess with his sabre-toothed cat shifting and super senses
@[clementia] listen, i don't know why he's so weird