maybe you were the ocean
For a long while he had left it well enough alone.
After their quest together when he had lost her in the blizzard and consequently found Khuma anew, after Salvage was born, the more intelligent parts of him realized that he should not seek out Eszka again. Those parts had known that there was nothing good to be found by looking for her, be it her own demise in the snow that day, or simply the smoking affection that threatened to bloom and become fire at any moment (an affair that could jeopardize what had newly come to him again with the mother of his new child). He had done his best to clear his mind of her then. He tried to unsee the round of her hips, and the gentle curve to her neck. He tried to forget the way she became darker in the sea. He swore up and down that the time he compared the colours of her eyes to the bleeding sky was just a distant dream.
But in her absence she was everywhere.
In every space that she wasn’t he would be reminded of their last moments. He would see the snow falling all around them, blinding them both. He would hear the way her voice rang out, broken and afraid, the last time she’d called out to him on the shoreline. On every inch of this frozen wasteland she’d become a ghost, haunting him between copses of evergreens and watching him from just beyond the opposite edge of the heart shaped lake.
The happiness he’d found with Khuma and Salvage was real, and unwavering, but it became eclipsed with not knowing until the shadows were so large and dark they threatened to swallow him whole. He had left then, swimming those same frozen waters back to Nerine to see if he could determine what had become of her. He braced himself for an ugly truth remembering the biting, unrelenting cold.
But instead he found her — safe, alive, lovely in spite of her scars.
And they came together like when the sea meets the shore; again and again, with violence and passion in equal measures and with just enough shame settling upon each of their shoulders to ruin the rosy afterglow of it. It isn’t that he’d meant to ruin what he’d begun with Khuma and Salvage, but he’d never been made for it, had he? They’d parted ways again, Wane wondering how he was meant to face his family again when he so clearly reeked of his own betrayal. In spite of his nagging doubts he swallowed the truth and returned home without mention of what transpired in Nerine that night.
Somehow, he had managed to swallow the guilt, too.
But now, as she stands before him dripping and with a rounded, swollen belly as he breaks through an edging of bramble along the shoreline, it creeps forwards again. An instant sense of foreboding creeps up through his legs and burrows into the pit of his stomach that makes him swallow, hard. Quickly, he cranes his head to peer across the distance for any trace of Salvage and his mother and when the visual comes back clear at last he moves forwards to meet her.
“Eszka,” he says, unable to swallow the edge of disbelief that escapes at the sight of her here, like this. He means to question her sanity, swimming the frozen waters in her condition, but the thought suddenly alludes him as he draws near. All he remembers is the way the soft colours of her body come together, and how her eyes could melt out into the sky. The guilt is alive and well, of course, but there’s something else; smoke, becoming flames, becoming fire.
He says, and with a rakish grin: “You missed me that much, hey?”
What he means is: I missed you.
The isle just got a whole lot smaller.
@[Agnieszka]