[private] everything that dies makes its way back, ryatah

[jarris]

i was ready to die for ya, baby
doesn’t mean i’m ready to stay

His has always been a bastard heart. (How many decades had he shuddered as women sank their teeth into the meat of it? How many years had love spent taking him to his knees?) But this is a different sensation altogether, the way she teases at the life force itself. It is not the heart she manipulates, but something entirely different. (He has felt it before, when Death has come calling and he has somehow evaded its capture. He has felt its effervescence in his veins and thought it magic. And it is, he knows it now with certainty.) 

And he, too, has only some vague memory of that day on the Beach. The day she had jumped. Had he gone down to the shore to die, as well? It is strange, the way this memory curls itself into a tight knot of anxiety in the pit of his gut as he considers it.

He exhales, studies her face and wonders if it had been then that she’d been reborn something blessed, something sacred, something celestial. She looks like a thing of dreams, he thinks. She looks, certainly, like something of the heavens. To him, it seems the natural order of things that she should emerge from the jaws of Death something redeemed, especially after something so precious as eternal life had been taken from her. 

There, of course, is a sting of guilt. It had been a gift to her and, through some cruel twist of fate, it had become his. “I hardly think I was worthy of it,” he says while those golden tears cut rivers down his cheeks, while the blood drips steady down his forehead. “My sins have been many,” he admits and turns his gaze away. 

She reaches for him then and the eyes drift heavy closed. He cannot bear to see the way her skin must be stained. Then, a sad smile and he forces open his eyes. And he nods. “I suppose,” he murmurs, “a gift I was far more deserving of.” 

— Jarris