There is a change that unfolds inside him, a moment where that easy, beautiful smile falters and disappears, where his path to her slows and then halts and she wonders at that subtle shift she sees inside the summer of his meadow eyes. She watches him with a kind of silence that touches her tongue and her eyes and the line of a mouth made for frowning, would touch her heart and make it stone except that (as always, when he is around) it is a thing already in wild turmoil.
He seems different in this moment, maybe, like a man unsure or subdued, and she finds it suddenly hard to hold his quiet gaze because she wonders if he can tell that this sense of wrongness comes from being so close to her. “Then maybe I should wait to share mine with you.” She says, breaking the silence inside herself. “No Name seems easy enough to remember.” She smiles, but it is something small and shadowed, something that flashes like flint in the wounds buried behind the colors of her eyes. “Or,” She doesn’t move any closer to him, doesn’t reach out to touch the shining ore of that sun-burnt copper color. “Or, you could call me Illuminae.”
It feels wrong to give him her name, feels like she should’ve already done it, feels like she should have held onto it longer. It is just a name, just a collection of sounds that she wants to hear whispered in the quiet of his voice, but it also feels like a tether between them. Something that binds them even in the simplest of ways.
Ghosts don’t have names, so she will always be someone to him now.
She doesn’t miss the way he opts not to answer her question, and it draws a sharp kind of suspicion into the contrast of her white-gold and black face. “I asked you first.” She says, and it isn’t a scowl exactly that etches itself across her face - it is something spun of worry and intuition and this strange affection that keeps trying to watch him with her eyes. It is concern in it’s most ragged form. But then he steps closer and it is like his nearness is a weight against her chest that makes it hard to breathe, because suddenly she is holding her breath and searching his face, counting every second that passes between them in weighted silence.
“I don’t know.” It is a whisper, an exhale when she finally answers him, and the aura of darkness around her skin thickens as it feeds off her uncertainty. “I haven’t felt myself recently.” She is vulnerable for a moment, worried eyes soft instead of wary, pain etched like gilded gold throughout her mismarked face. She reaches for him and pauses, pulling her nose back in again towards the gravity of her own chest, to the racing heart inside it. “What were the feelings?” She feels laid bare beneath the green of his gaze as it wanders to the twin halos above her ears and back down to her face again.
He seems different in this moment, maybe, like a man unsure or subdued, and she finds it suddenly hard to hold his quiet gaze because she wonders if he can tell that this sense of wrongness comes from being so close to her. “Then maybe I should wait to share mine with you.” She says, breaking the silence inside herself. “No Name seems easy enough to remember.” She smiles, but it is something small and shadowed, something that flashes like flint in the wounds buried behind the colors of her eyes. “Or,” She doesn’t move any closer to him, doesn’t reach out to touch the shining ore of that sun-burnt copper color. “Or, you could call me Illuminae.”
It feels wrong to give him her name, feels like she should’ve already done it, feels like she should have held onto it longer. It is just a name, just a collection of sounds that she wants to hear whispered in the quiet of his voice, but it also feels like a tether between them. Something that binds them even in the simplest of ways.
Ghosts don’t have names, so she will always be someone to him now.
She doesn’t miss the way he opts not to answer her question, and it draws a sharp kind of suspicion into the contrast of her white-gold and black face. “I asked you first.” She says, and it isn’t a scowl exactly that etches itself across her face - it is something spun of worry and intuition and this strange affection that keeps trying to watch him with her eyes. It is concern in it’s most ragged form. But then he steps closer and it is like his nearness is a weight against her chest that makes it hard to breathe, because suddenly she is holding her breath and searching his face, counting every second that passes between them in weighted silence.
“I don’t know.” It is a whisper, an exhale when she finally answers him, and the aura of darkness around her skin thickens as it feeds off her uncertainty. “I haven’t felt myself recently.” She is vulnerable for a moment, worried eyes soft instead of wary, pain etched like gilded gold throughout her mismarked face. She reaches for him and pauses, pulling her nose back in again towards the gravity of her own chest, to the racing heart inside it. “What were the feelings?” She feels laid bare beneath the green of his gaze as it wanders to the twin halos above her ears and back down to her face again.
ILLUMINAE
we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break