She does not miss the way her question presses a stillness into his bones, into the quiet of those dark eyes. For a moment she wonders if maybe she’s pushed too hard, if she is forcing unwilling secrets from him. Her brow furrows quickly and those pale gold eyes flash as she stretches her nose to his cheek. Her lips brush the soft blue of his jaw and follow the slope of his chin to the corner of his lips as though she is trying to coax a smile from the quiet way he considers her.
He answers and she pulls away to let the cold air fill the shallow space between them. “Will you hide from me?” She wonders aloud and her voice is like the sound of glass breaking on stone. She can feel worry thread itself like a snake along her spine, can feel her bones bending and her chest caving in at the idea that Shah might disappear from her world again. But it feels selfish to make him stay, to let him see the way this idea, this worry, tears at her tattered heart.
Instead she watches him uncertainly, her face carefully blank as she considers what a life without him would be like. It felt wrong somehow, as wrong as blue sky beneath her feet and rolling green meadows stretched around the sun and clouds. Still, she says nothing even as the bruises in her bright gold eyes darken.
But the shadows around them deepen again, they press closer and so does he, closer still, and she crumbles against him. “Shah.” She breathes and it is like a prayer and a plea and an apology, it is everything she cannot say, everything she needs him to know rolled into one single word, his name, and she wills him to understand even as she knows he cannot possibly understand. “I want to hide with you forever.” She confesses into the curve of his shoulder, in a voice so small she doubted he would know the shape of her words.
She feels him stiffen again and she pulls away to watch his face as he works his way through the idea of Ilka being a mother. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not the soft curve of an almost smile or near-warmth flickering in the depths of his eyes. In an instant she could feel the knots in her stomach untying, could feel the bones in her chest relenting in the way they had seemed to tighten around her aching heart. “Really.” She confirmed, and her mouth softened with something that might’ve been the echo of a smile, the memory of warmth.
And then with gold eyes that drift between his face and the impossible darkness around them, she paused. “Are these yours, Shah?” She inches closer to the cocoon of shadow, stretching her nose to draw it quietly across the absence of light. “They must be,” she amends softly, not waiting for his answer, “because they make me feel safe, like I don’t have to worry about anything out there.” She pauses and her eyes lift honestly to his perfect face. “And that is exactly how I feel when I’m with you.”
ILKA
makai x oksana
shah is the best ever D: <333