that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
It does not occur to him that to tamper with her magic would be an insult, would be a violation. That he would overstep boundaries and perhaps insult her by playing with her gifts that pour into the area around them, forcing the very elements to bend the knee and fast forward time to her preferred season. And because he does not enter her thoughts, he does not learn of such thoughts, however mild they may be.
He just feels the bitter cold and the bite of the blizzard and the pain—
the pain that he could cut off at the start but chooses instead to sink into.
He focuses on her, the cold of her, and wonders if she does not feel such pain. Is she indifferent to it? Does she merely feel the cold as a comfort? The rest of the world as something to be ignored?
How he longs for that.
How jealous he is of her perceived protected heart.
“That is no short distance,” he comments, although his mind has fractured and followed along a million different paths—thinking of where she has been, where she is going, who she is underneath it all. It only comes back at her next question, when she labels him a magician. A title he has not yet grown comfortable with, although the earth has spun on its axis and he still has this power flowing through him.
“I came from the in-between,” he says simply, because he doesn’t know how else to describe the place that has he been, the way that he has floated in the ether. “It was cold there,” a quirk of his lip and a shadow of the boy that he once might have been had time and life not stepped on his throat.
“But perhaps not as cold as the winter in your veins.”
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
