11-15-2021, 06:43 PM
ILLUM
She says his name in such a quiet way that it nearly drags his golden gaze to the silhouette of her delicate face beside him, just that single word enough to increase a gravity beneath his skin until he feels like he might drift away into the nebula of those soft, dark eyes. He doesn’t understand the way something knots inside his gut, the way he is pleased beyond a sense of arrogance that she remembers him so readily. Nor does he understand the way that knot clenches hard when the whisper of her apology settles against his dark and stardust ears. For a moment he can feel his eyes harden, a shade of golden uncertainty and the crook of a frown on lips made for it. But he can feel the swing of her gaze on him, feel soft eyes that likely trace the shape of things he’d rather her not find, so he pushes back the feeling, pushes back this thing that feels like regret to make her feel as though she owes him any apology.
It is the words that follow that snap his eyes to her face finally, this thing that might be an admission or a confession and even though it doesn’t feel like an important enough distinction, he feels oddly sure there is a difference. It takes only four seconds for him to see a change in her. The first to be shackled by soft eyes a shade too bright to be anything but sorrowful. The second to break free from a gravity that immediately drags him under. The third to realize it is not something he wants to fight, because the fourth has him closing the distance between them to press his mouth to the curve of a neck whose warmth and scent makes something inside his chest ache in a way some ancient part of him wants to writhe against. There is not a single rational reason why he should be sharing this truth with her, and yet, for once, he does not stand behind the armor of vague indifference. “Nor I you.”
It takes only one more second, a fifth, to be reminded of why indifference is safer.
Did you know my mother is dead?
He finds himself wondering why words feel the same as steel plunged into the chasm of his dark, roiling chest. Why seven is the number of pain. Seven words, seven daggers, seven seconds and now he frays the same as Este. He doesn’t know how to mourn a thing like this, how to accept that Ryatah could ever be anything but eternal in her gentleness. It feels like war inside his chest and beneath his skin, like his bones are eroding and the marrow must be spilling itself into the depths of the Hyaline lake. He thinks he needs to come undone, to let the night explode from him until he is fragments, until he is dust, until he is nothing, because this is a truth he does not even know how to believe.
Except when he looks to Este again and finds her face turned away, he thinks, too, that it is not his turn to mourn the archangel. “I did not.” He says, and he knows his voice is too tight and too raw, that there is pain in his dark, golden eyes and in the bitter tension of his mouth. He knows that the dark spills from him until the night is roiling with black and indigo and the twinkling of stardust, that beneath the gauzy haze of his skin his bones clench to the point of breaking - and he feels sorry to ask her this, he knows that he should not force her to this place, but he needs to know, to understand. “What happened?” Because the part of him that thinks Este would not lie about a thing like this is raging all out war against the part of him that had always assumed Ryatah would be there forever.
He reaches for her again, silent when he presses her to the cool curve of his chest, when he lets his wings fall around them and wonders with a pang of darkness if Este will balk at feeling trapped by him. She should, of course, and he wouldn’t blame her for pulling away, wouldn’t stop her from doing it. But it is as though grief and confusion have scoured away the dark in him and left behind only the indigo of night, the pinprick light of distant stars, because in this moment he feels thrown back in time to place when he was still young and uncorrupt, to when he was himself yet unmade by another.
His voice is stardust, it is the twilight of late evening and the ephemera of stars when he buries his lips in the softness of her mane and says, “Tell me what you need, Este.”
It is the words that follow that snap his eyes to her face finally, this thing that might be an admission or a confession and even though it doesn’t feel like an important enough distinction, he feels oddly sure there is a difference. It takes only four seconds for him to see a change in her. The first to be shackled by soft eyes a shade too bright to be anything but sorrowful. The second to break free from a gravity that immediately drags him under. The third to realize it is not something he wants to fight, because the fourth has him closing the distance between them to press his mouth to the curve of a neck whose warmth and scent makes something inside his chest ache in a way some ancient part of him wants to writhe against. There is not a single rational reason why he should be sharing this truth with her, and yet, for once, he does not stand behind the armor of vague indifference. “Nor I you.”
It takes only one more second, a fifth, to be reminded of why indifference is safer.
Did you know my mother is dead?
He finds himself wondering why words feel the same as steel plunged into the chasm of his dark, roiling chest. Why seven is the number of pain. Seven words, seven daggers, seven seconds and now he frays the same as Este. He doesn’t know how to mourn a thing like this, how to accept that Ryatah could ever be anything but eternal in her gentleness. It feels like war inside his chest and beneath his skin, like his bones are eroding and the marrow must be spilling itself into the depths of the Hyaline lake. He thinks he needs to come undone, to let the night explode from him until he is fragments, until he is dust, until he is nothing, because this is a truth he does not even know how to believe.
Except when he looks to Este again and finds her face turned away, he thinks, too, that it is not his turn to mourn the archangel. “I did not.” He says, and he knows his voice is too tight and too raw, that there is pain in his dark, golden eyes and in the bitter tension of his mouth. He knows that the dark spills from him until the night is roiling with black and indigo and the twinkling of stardust, that beneath the gauzy haze of his skin his bones clench to the point of breaking - and he feels sorry to ask her this, he knows that he should not force her to this place, but he needs to know, to understand. “What happened?” Because the part of him that thinks Este would not lie about a thing like this is raging all out war against the part of him that had always assumed Ryatah would be there forever.
He reaches for her again, silent when he presses her to the cool curve of his chest, when he lets his wings fall around them and wonders with a pang of darkness if Este will balk at feeling trapped by him. She should, of course, and he wouldn’t blame her for pulling away, wouldn’t stop her from doing it. But it is as though grief and confusion have scoured away the dark in him and left behind only the indigo of night, the pinprick light of distant stars, because in this moment he feels thrown back in time to place when he was still young and uncorrupt, to when he was himself yet unmade by another.
His voice is stardust, it is the twilight of late evening and the ephemera of stars when he buries his lips in the softness of her mane and says, “Tell me what you need, Este.”
@Este