hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
That is not what I mean, and you know it.
Those same dark eyes lift reluctantly to his face, to trace the hurt and the tension and the worry drawing deep furrows in the black of his skin. She isn’t sure what it is she looks for, but she must find it there because her rigid body slackens and the fight falls away from her in a rush. For a long moment she cannot meet his eyes again, but it isn’t pride or fury that blinds her, it is an uncomfortable mix of regret and dawning understanding. “I’m sorry, Offspring.” She tells him in a whisper, and it is unclouded by any of the excuses she had brandished at him before.
He heals her with winter and ice, though it is his closeness that soothes the hurt in her chest, and she holds onto her silence even when the tattered edges of mutilated flesh protest at the contact. When he is done she can no longer feel the creeping fever-heat of infection, or the weight of too much flesh hanging awkwardly where it should cover muscle and fat. With a sigh that shudders unbidden from the dark velvet of her delicate mouth, she lifts her face to watch him. It isn’t a surprise to see the deep blue throbbing from his eyes, or the layers of ice and frost that cling to him as though they want for nothing more than to claim him for themselves.
She had done this to him.
Her brow furrows when he speaks again, her heart bobbing low in her chest as it drowned in such quiet, impossible misery. With the same quiet stoicism she had come to love in him, he bid her to go, to rest. But she balked at this, wholly undone by the unnamable emotion she thought she saw hiding in the shadows of his face. “No,” she tells him softly, flinching apologetically at her continued disobedience, “I’ve been gone for days, I just want to stay here with you.” Before he can turn from her, she reaches out to take a mouthful of frost encrusted mane between her lips, tugging him ever closer. “Please,” she whispers again even softer this time, her voice as fragile as the frost clinging to his dark lashes, “please stay.” She releases his mane and eases tiredly closer, tucking herself to the curve of his neck, against the embrace of his tense chest. There had been a moment, when the wolves came in a wave of grey like dirty snow, that she thought she might never see Offspring again. To have him so close now, to press her cheek to the ice of his chest and listen for the echo of his heartbeat and still feel an impossible distance stretched between them was the worst kind of agony.
She takes a breath and it is a shuddering sound, like when the wind rattles the trees in the night, and the branches click together like bones. “I didn’t take them with me.” Her brow pulls tight beneath the dark tangles of her forelock, furrowing when her lips traced over the lines of ice against his shoulder. “I left alone,” and she says this as gently as she can because it is not meant to renew the pain in his chest, “and I thought they were asleep in one of the caves. They caught up with me much later. I promise, I didn’t know.” She shivers against him now, partially from the ice within and partially from the ice without. It is impossible, in this moment, not to wonder if she is the worst thing for him. To trace the frigid blue of his eyes, the stoniness of his face and not think, I made him like this. But she is selfish, so selfish, and the idea of giving him a life without her (an easier life) makes her heart throb in a way she would never be able to describe.
She closes her eyes and bows her head, still pressed as close to his chest as he would allow in this time of so much tension, of fear that wedges them dangerously apart. “I had a dream,” and her eyes flash with something dark, something dangerously broken and she cannot tell him more, “it was about my brother. I just wanted to know if he was back, if he was okay. If he’s even still alive.” Her voice crumbles and she looks to the churned up snow at their feet. The color is grey and uneven, mottled and dirty and it makes her think of the rippling wolf pelts. She finds she cannot pull her eyes away even as her pulse turns molten and thrumming in the rivers of her veins, but she says breathlessly, “I should have waited for you.”
Isle
