"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

She is a monster in every moment but these, sprawled in the dark with her flanks damp and her sides heaving. It is the closest she will ever be to the wild brown girl she was meant to be, the girl this world ate up and ruined, took all her broken pieces and molded them into something dark and wrong.  

In the emptiness of night she groans and strains, eyes closed to the stars strewn across a velvet sky - the same sky he died beneath. Killdare, her Killdare. It is why she picked this place, a shipwreck of broken bodies and scattered bones, full of ghosts and death and the things that go bump in the night. What better place could there be for monster like her, cursed and thorny and ruinous to everything she touches.

And -

She wants to feel close to him now, remembers when she had given birth to their first, how he had come to her when she thought he would not. When he had another to love and be loved by, someone who would have protected him better than Malis ever could.

But he was always hers, always, and even now, here, she is his.

She groans again, sides heaving, and she can feel the sweat creeping up her neck and darkening her chest to bury her blue in pale white sand. Her legs draw long furrows in the ground, her jaw hollowing out a valley for her face to settle in, and she is relieved by the cold earth beneath when everything else feels like burning, molten heat. Her body tightens and she bites back a third groan, stretching her head so it arches her back when she pushes this small, dark bundle out into the sand behind her.

And oh, he is beautiful. But they always are, aren’t they? Little slivers of the only good she has ever done, come to life in a perfect little miniature bodies. And this one - he is like her, so much like her. The first to share her shade of indigo, the first with galaxies in miniature strewn across his skin.

She is certain the dark god left them there deliberately so she will not forget him.  

“Hello, little one.” She murmurs as she shifts to clean him, safe to be soft when there is no one but him to see it. Her tongue sweeps across his face and over his ears, lips working on the downy tufts of his mane - fussing and cleaning until another contraction pushes her back down again. She had known, of course, had guessed by the size of her belly and by the way the birth of the boy had not eased her discomfort. But knowing doesn’t make it any easier a second time.

She heaves and pushes, struggles gently so as not to hurt her boy, her beautiful son as he lay quietly by her heels. Heaves until her body shudders and finally, she is finished. It takes a moment for her to ease up again, lazy seconds slipping past so her body can repair itself. But she is impatient (even exhausted, even used up like this) and she rises with a grunt of effort, moving to where they are so she can clean them.

They are so much alike - and so much like her. One boy, one girl, both blue and beautiful and dusted in his stars. She wonders in what other ways they are like her, in what other ways they are like him. But it doesn’t matter, not yet, they are still too new to be broken, still too perfect and she will kill to keep them this way.

She wonders what kind of a father he is, if he even cares about them, innumerable as they are.

Her lips are soft when she tugs at their little ears and downy manes, huffs warm breaths against their damp necks and coaxes them up to nurse. Presses her mouth to the points of their delicate hips and shoulders, feels the curve of their spine against her lips. It is a relief to find them whole and healthy, to find everything where it should be. “Come now,” she tells them, brushes their forelocks from their eyes so she can see the static stars that spill down along their beautiful faces, “up you go.”

MALIS

makai x oksana