and at once i knew
i was not magnificent
If you had asked him – though no one asked anything of him anymore, really – he would have said that when your ghosts return to you, they come back to you just as you remember them. He has never known her this way, angular and quiet, the edge of her voice barbed from disuse.
How could he have known to imagine her this way?
The mind surprises him, he thinks, with all the things it’s capable of.
She touches him and he sucks in a sharp breath and he realizes that this is home. It is not the land and all the ways it’s changed. It is not the distant feeling of familiarity in this forest or the meadow along its gilded edge. It is the way she touches him and how it chases a tremor down the ladder of his spine.
This is home.
She is home.
His beloved Plumeria.
His weary eyes drift closed and the touch arrests the air in his lungs and, for one split second, the bastard heart in the cavern of his chest.
How long has it been since he felt it?
Years. So many years.
“Will you stay with me awhile?” he asks.
He knows that ghosts are vulnerable to the shifting of wind and the fickle wiles of the mind, but he asks it anyway. Because he cannot bear to watch her fade away. Because, for the moment, she is here and he does not have to think about what it means. He does not have to think of her on the beach, alone.
And then he touches her, too. Lays his weary head heavy on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Plumeria,” he says. “I’m sorry that I did not come back for you when there was still time for us.”
son of caden & fray
once-king of the hidden tundra