02-26-2017, 07:13 PM
Nothing is permanent, not even skin, it seems, for his own has changed, warped from paper-thinness to this new red-roan state, thick. This, of course, is a changes he welcomes, is glad to be shed of his delicacy (and there are nightmares aplenty of it returning, of waking to frail and tearing skin).
She wants a different answer, though, he can read this in her eye s- the words themselves, too, are tinged in something pleading and he wants to say yes because something in him wants to give her the answers she wants, wants to reaffirm some kind of rightness to her world.
Ah, but he can’t. So he compromises.
“I don’t know,” he says, though he thinks he does, but he doesn’t give this answer. He gives a nothing answer. I don’t know.
Too late, she says don’t answer that but the words are gone, hanging between them, an answer unwanted by both of them. And then she is closing the distance, and he can catch a bit of her scent, and sighs, because it’s nice, and strange, and those two things should maybe be mutually exclusive but aren’t.
Don’t move, she says, and he doesn’t. He is still as stone.
She hums, a pleasant noise, and he feels a distant tickling sensation in his body, and he can’t place it until it settles on a particularly fresh bruise, and the distant pain of it goes away, and he realizes she is healing him, all the small pains.
Are you okay, she asks, and he almost laughs.
“Yes,” he says, “better than okay.”
There are other things that go unhealed, of course – for all her power, she cannot dip into the gullies of his mind – but the mere fact she cares causes a sort of warmth in his chest.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” he says, which is foolish to say – why should he have known that?- but then, “it’s wonderful, what you can do.”
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark