we're knocking knees in a traveling breeze; brigade

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

He touches her back, keeps touching her, and her heart pounds hard enough in her chest that she has a moment to wonder if he can hear it. She can feel too well the softness of his lips against her neck, her throat, and then his forehead to hers, warm and alive, and she realizes how much she wants - needs - him to stay that way.
She is shocked when he says wolves. She has always thought fondly of wolves, having only known them when they were together in the dream-world. She has heard them in this world, but only as distant howls. Truth is, Irisa does not know much of danger, having never really been in it herself. She has certainly never died.
She doesn’t know that there was a version of her – the first version – who starved to death in a broken dreamland, in another quest longer ago. She doesn’t know that she is a recreation of that girl, that she was always living up to some unknown standard.
(Though perhaps she sensed this, somewhere, a vague discomfort with her mother, why mother showed things and always expected Irisa to act in a certain way, a way she tried to guess at. She was successful, mostly, and even when she wasn’t, Heartworm never seemed angry, only faintly sad.)

She is silent for a moment, after, breathless at the idea – of death, and more, of him dying.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and the words do not adequately express her emotions, the depth of them, horror and relief and so much more, swirling inside her but unable to be articulated.
“I’m glad you came back,” she says, and that’s almost adequate, it’s more than I’m sorry,, at least. Still not enough. Nothing she says can be enough.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm