Sea Salt & Sugar // Abysm

[abysm]

The mounting silence begins to frighten him;

Probably because she had yet to falter in speech and she seems robbed of words at the moment. A moment that becomes tortuous as it drags him down into a mood that is bleak and black. It might have been the mist in her eyes that he longed to wipe away but couldn’t quite reach out to her just yet. It seemed too personal to touch her face and whisk away the sadness he found there, despite however much he longed to. Or it might have been the longing that frightened him too, because it was too new and he did not know how to process it in the seconds and minutes that they’d been given.

I don’t know.

Her disappointment makes him bristle. It needles at him, teasing but certain. He doesn’t fault her for it. No, he faults the vision that she has seen but cannot fully explain. Part of him doesn’t want to hear those explanations anyway. They all seem so very paltry compared to the way her face shimmers and deepens into a sadness he cannot brush away with any amount of concerned touches. He tells himself it is concern, but it is more than that - something budding and tender that he’s not quite sure how to tend to so he lets it squander in his chest. 

Almost as if he can hear her thoughts, he dismisses any notion she might have about trying again. “Don’t even think about it.” he warns her. Now his concern is apparent. So is that something more that he thinks he could keep out of his voice but it creeps in anyway, refusing to be pushed down and stepped on. It looms, growing and growing and oozes out of his every pore as he looks upon her with a fondness he hadn’t known he was capable of for anyone that wasn’t his father, or secretly, the growing brood of siblings he finds himself with. 

Then he can think no more as she moves into him. Their chests touch, and her head tilts into a light touch upon his withers that he knows he’ll miss the moment she moves it. “That’s good,” he murmurs into her skin, not quite sure where exactly he’s touching her since his eyes are closed to hold this moment forever inside his mind. “Someday,” he promises, once he knows where it is and when and if it is safe to take her there. The dreamlands weren’t always that so it concerns him that she just saw him as gone, away, absent. 

But wasn’t that the very thing he’d always dreamt of? Almost like a return to the abyss that birthed him. No - the nothingness did not give him this life, Kagerus had the second she stole him out of the dreaming dark and planted him inside her uterine prison. “Someday,” he vows as he shuts out the dark and the beckoning of the dreamlands spurred on by her mention of going there. He can feel the dreams call to him in siren notes of enchantment. It makes him wonder just what all she had seen but he trusts that she’d have told him all of it, tasting not falsehood in her truths.

He’d gone away. Not now, but once before. It must happen again. Not might, but must because she’d seen it. Whether it was in dreams or this life, he’d gone away. He hopes that he’ll return - to her, for little else seems to matter in that moment but the press of their young bodies together. “I’m sorry,” he whispers into her skin, not sure why he ought to apologize but knowing that somehow it’s just the right thing to do.

@[Sibyl] same! this was a joy to write, this thread. i'm fully happy to continue it or wrap it up and plan on them meeting up later on. cannot thank you enough love, for letting them interact and things to build up that'll shape their characters later on. <33