Her chest is a garden overgrown with pain. She can feel the thorns and brambles growing there, can feel the lack of sun and warmth and the way it is all dying, always dying - and maybe she should be glad she had been reborn without a heart, because surely if it still existed it would have been strangled lifeless by now.
Turns out hearts are less important than she thought, though.
She wonders if he knows that he is her most exquisite pain. That these walls around his heart, so vast and insurmountable, leave her stranded beneath them in a shadow of perpetual doubt wondering how things between them had ever been so easy. It feels like fighting rock now, like reaching for stardust and coming back with only the emptiness of cold space. She is losing him, and it is a wonder at all that she can lose something already lost.
But she can feel it in her chest, that widening gap, that yawning distance. It doesn’t matter that his words are as soft as the flowers in the branches of her mane, or that his touch wakes some old unacknowledged yearning in the depths of her silent chest. She knows he has already started to leave her again, that it means nothing that he still stands physically before her. Close enough to touch, yet somehow too far to reach.
She pulls away from him, and she is glad for the treacherous emptiness of the form she now takes. No heart to break, no lungs to heave, no tears to fall down dark wooden cheeks. Secrets forever buried inside the hollowness of her.
“I thought it mattered.” She tells him quietly, eyes on his face and then away again, burned by the familiarity of him. “I never needed you to protect me. I never asked for that.” Guilt, because he hadn’t asked for that either, yet she had done so anyway and the ghost of that decision would haunt each of them for eternity. “No one ever gets what they deserve.” She tells him, those pink tourmaline eyes like spilled petals. “Unless you think I deserved this.”
Death, she means.
Her gaze settles on the curve of his mouth, and brambles inside her chest squeeze until she feels like she might die, like she might already be dead. “I can’t.” She says of the smile he asks for. “It would just be a lie.” She takes another step back, and another, and wonders where she ever found the willpower. “I think I know how stars feel when the sky casts them down.” Because this feeling in her chest is beyond any shade of loneliness she ever thought she knew.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
@[nikolaus]