She is a creature made for such hollowness, made brittle and beautiful for the sake of being broken a dozen times over. Once, she had been a girl. Bright and innocent, as wild as the jungle she had been raised in. But time is sharp and it is heavy, it cleaves when it swings like a pendulum, ruinous and wicked, carving out a path at whatever the cost. It has cleaved pieces from her own heart many times over. Once when her family fell apart, a childhood with a memory for a father, a shadow always just out of reach. Twice when that man stole her from home to place her in hands that would ruin her. Three, four times when she was taken again, ruined again, used again. Five when Pollock took her in her own world, broke her open and filled her up again, though with a child. Their child.
But each time she had recovered, gathering up whatever pieces still remained to shape some new version of herself out of the brokenness. It made her sharp and ugly, barbed, and few bothered to know her. There was one, though, one who had not shied away from her dark and her wild, one whose heart was made for better things, greater things, and yet chose her all the same. He had fallen for her, in heart and soul, fallen to join her in her dark and her brokenness so that she would not be alone anymore. In return, she would have given him anything, did give him everything. Every part of her.
But the pendulum swung again, seven, and he was gone.
Stolen, taken, borrowed, someplace she could not follow.
She might’ve tried to follow him too, if not for the way her belly thickened with new life.
There would be no recovering from seven.
Her mouth is a hard slash, a beautiful grimace as she stands alone beneath the trees, turned so that her lips are settled against the curve of a blue barrel that has grown impossibly large. She likes to feel them move inside her, when they stretch and kick and turn, when they settle again, when they shift beneath her touch. The pain is nothing, small feet forced where the organs are soft and unprotected, small mounds that appear beneath the indigo and travel sideways until they are gone again. The pain makes them more real, takes away some of the loneliness and so she welcomes it. She knows there is more than one, guesses that they must be large like their father for she has never grown so thick before, not even with Milia and Roque. She does not guess there are three.
A sound in the shadow draws her attention immediately, and she ducks her wild face slightly in warning so that those long, curving horns gleam in quiet threat. But the man is not trying to be stealthy, not trying to take her unaware, and when her eyes find the black and green, the soft haze of luminous wings, she softens. “Mortal.” She remembers him, jaw clenching painfully at the cruelty of his familiarity. He is not his father, but he is so like him – strong and graceful, heavy of bone but in the way of a warrior, broad and beautiful. His eyes are green but they are brighter and she is grateful for the difference, grateful that she can watch him now without looking away. “He left us all, boy.” She says sharply, furious at his accusation, dipping her nose so that the horns flash wickedly at him. But he is too much like him, physically at least, too much of the body she had grown to love, and so she softens if only a little for the boy who is not a boy at all, but a man like his father. “It wasn’t his choice to make, leaving us. He would have stayed.”
Her voice is quiet now, distant; distracted as those emerald-bright eyes slip across his figure. She traces the arch of his neck, smooth and black and strong, follows the curve of those gleaming wings, appreciating the way the translucent membrane traps reluctant sunlight within them. Her eyes drift along the curve of his spin and over his hips, down to note broad legs that have decidedly less feathering than Killdare did. “You look like him.” She says at last with a sigh, drifting closer to press the heat of her mouth against the curve of his shoulder as she so often does, willing his own mouth against her spine in how she settles beneath him. This loneliness is tiresome, it is treacherous, and so she seeks to force him to carry some of the weight, to press blue to black so they are like a bruise beneath the trees. He doesn’t pity her like the others do, does not watch her with sad eyes that think they understand, and it is a welcomed change.
For a moment she is silent, quiet with her mouth against his neck, quiet as she remembers a day near this forest that he would have no way of knowing. A day that had started darkly, unremarkably, but would change all that followed. “I met him like this, you know.” She says plainly after a moment, reaching out to brush her lips along the edge of one wing. “Broken and with child, more ruined then than I am now.” She isn’t sure that’s true, physically perhaps, but her heart hurts worse now. “But he saw something in me that I still cannot see.” She pauses, tenses, and the softness of her mouth disappears from his neck when she shifts to pull away from him, to ease back so that he can see all of her. Then, quietly, with a frown that is full of pain and beauty and a wild brokenness, “What do you see in me, Mortal?”
MALIS
makai x oksana