She comes and it’s almost like he had known that she would.
He glances up and suddenly the rest of this Beqanna that is not Beqanna bleeds away and it’s just the two of them. It’s just the two of them and he feels his heart that is suddenly beating so fiercely (has he always had a heart that beat this loud?) that he feels that he cannot hear his own thoughts. His throat is dry and the nerves that he had not felt while sedated in the afterlife suddenly spring to life in stark relief.
She comes near him but doesn’t bridge the gap.
He doesn’t mind because he does.
Life has been too long, and death too infinite, for him to do anything but reach for her and pull her close. She feels so similar beneath his touch and he aches with the memory of their life together before. He feels it like a third being between them, but he doesn’t care. Doesn’t care about anything than the fact that the two of them are standing here together and are breathing and the air is so cold and crisp that it hurts.
Plume presses kisses, fervent and fevered, across her forehead and down the arch of her neck. He lingers and nips and laughs throatily as he relearns the shape of her in this new world, in this new body, in this new chance. Between the kisses, he whispers breathlessly. “I don’t know,” he says, his voice husky and hoarse and tinged with the rust that can only come from spending decades in a world of the non-living.
“I don’t know or how long it will last and I don’t care, Agetta.”
He kisses her again before pulling back so that he can stare at her, study her, soak in every moment.
“I don’t care because we’re together. We’re here.”
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to