Eilidh’s never been religious, but she hopes that whatever higher power might exist that it takes pity on her and that her soul gets to meet Moselle’s again, somewhere, in another world or another life and that their hearts just recognize each other. Almost like Leander recognizes her now, tilting his head again like he knows what she is made of.
“Numb? That’s not a good sign.” He says, but she knows it could be worse. A scar was more manageable than a bleeding wound, wasn’t it?
He tells her he isn’t going anywhere; lost, like she was, and perhaps it’s in this moment that she sees something in him she hadn’t before when she notices the way that his eyes seem to cloud. He hides it better than she does, but it’s there. She studies the lines of his face then, and thinks he has a kind one. And then, when his mouth betrays him with clumsy sentences, she does laugh - genuinely, and not from cruelty. The sound is startling to her, and so the laugh, soft and sweet, does not last for any discernible amount of time.
“No, I want to stay.” She answers, decidedly.
The thing about loss is that it’s easier to let it eat you alive.
It’s harder to stand tall, to hold your heart up and keep it from drowning when it feels as heavy as iron. And it’s easy to lay out all of your memories from every year you’ve ever known and count them like christians, Before Death and After Death.
Because when she took her last breath, Eilidh’s heart threatened to break every rib in her body so that it could follow her to wherever she was going. And it destroyed her, the first time that it rained afterwards, and she’d looked down in regret just in time to realize that she’d washed the last traces of her mother away, the last skin she’d ever touched. But it was too late. She was clean, even if she’d never felt more ruined.
And she still haunts all of the places she used to be (this meadow, this river), even if she knows she can’t see her there again, because that’s what happens when you grieve; all of those beautiful shared memories become one-sided tics that you keep doing even though they don’t make sense anymore.
“Why are you here tonight, Leander?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Lydia] Shush, no I love him and I love you.