Can you find me soft asylum - any

[Pollock]

She had gone. (Or he thought, she had gone – unimportant. It had been the same to him. The same quiet. The same solitude.)

He had not mourned her.

Not the first time. Not the second time.

Whether it had been that she had decided to slink in the shadows like a rat or had been pulled back across that thin in-between she had occupied like an insurgent, clinging, as if she could evade the inevitable…

But it had never been inevitable.

Pollock had learned that, once and for all, when Hestia’s bones had become nothing but a shrine to the fickleness of the lifecycle. What had once been the hard and sun-baked place where they had second met (him and her – yes, he’ll still have to finger that mystery loose), a favoured landmark, had become a fixation. 

(Indigo.) 

Had become ruination, twice-over – Hestia’s body, completely stripped of all moisture and flesh, just teeth and bones and then… like a glossy ornament. Her, replete with colour (indigo) and plumpness...; those old remains had been two tombs entwined. Or should have been.

Should have been.

And then? Descecration. He had come back, frothy and panting, and she had been... gone. And he had forgotten about that black ghost, the green, the stars, the teal, the old gold, and all that was left was indigo. Because Hestia had returned, this is true. His first taste of unfinished business. (He couldn't say it had been sweet, but compared to what had come, it had been a minor sting.) She had not come back fully. At least he could have the smug satisfaction that he had condemned her twice over. First to death and then to a non-life cuffed to him.

But her – name unknown (though his name always sounds so honeyed on her tongue, the way he hears it, it hardly seems fair) – she had come back. Not as a shade of herself, but as everything she was before he had damaged her spine and left her dumb and, as it had turned out, pregnant, in bone bindings. She had come back – beautiful, but had looked better painted sanguinary red and asymmetric – and he had been bested. Jilted. Disrespected.

(She had become a queen, too, of that ancestral pinewood. He never did learn that little tidbit before the cataclysm – their reunion had been something… something unfinished. As, perhaps, everything between them would always be.)

He could thank Hestia for one thing, though. The softening leftovers of her rib cage and vertebrae had certainly played their part in the indigo mare’s death very well. The sound, ah – something to behold.

He is taking a step forward, to bridge the gap and inspect, with eye and lip, Sinew's soft, gnawed-at flesh up close, when he scents her on the air. And he feels no appreciation or kindness, just some bile bubbling on his lip, between his teeth – not this bitch again. He turns – though if he had been left in peace to consider the nature and curves of Sinew, no longer a girl at all, he would have been perfectly content – his black-brown eyes fixing on her, always their flat and inscrutable selves. “Hestia,” he drones, his lip curling – displeasure. 

Slowly, as he watches her and remembers the skew of her face when it had been better, it occurs to him that her scent is meaty and so… 

—“fuck off then, woman. If you wish to be free of me – I think I’ve made it no secret how I feel –… or has it been so long that life feels that foreign to you, now?” He takes some steps toward her, and there can be no doubt.

But it has lost its weight. She is not the first to come back.

“I don’t know how you bartered for your life returned, Hestia, but here we are. You stink – though,” he shrugs and dips his head, “it has been worse. So, be gone. Or do you need me to prove it to you?” He remembers the strange, ice-water sensation of her body passing through his. Not so, anymore. “And, you’d have to ask her that,” he does not move to motion to Sinew, only stares ahead, but he wears his wry, crocodilian grin, “I’ve not had time enough alone to figure that out myself. I do have my predilections, but I also have plenty enough of those. You know me.” 

Time will tell.

@[Kristin] is up next with @[sinew]