In the pale frost of October he’ll find her beneath the bleeding boughs of a red maple tree, lain out with the warmth of her side pressed flat across the meadow grass and grounded leaves. The clouds of her breath will roll away from her as she exhales the sweet smell of wet decay like plumes of smoke even though there is no fire inside of her. The fire is all around them instead, because here the grass looks gold instead of green when the morning sunlight washes across it the way that it does, and the leaves along the meadows edge flicker like the breath of fire as they shake in a crosswind -- yellow, and red, and orange, and alive.

There’s a sharpness to the air that mingles with the cold, and it brings something forgotten in Eilidh to life. Stretched out against the grass, her flesh slick with dew and cradled by the morning mist, she isn’t feeling the weight of sorrow. She isn’t existing with her eyes closed, thinking about the stars, or how she can realign them to conjure the lines of her mother’s beautiful face. There’s not enough time to translate into words all the ways that she is feeling, but the easiest explanation is that today she is simply lost in the warmth of the sunlight that reaches down to find her skin between the eyelets of the leaves.

And she is warmed right to the marrow.

And she’ll hear him coming before he’ll ever notice her there amongst the long grass. She’ll lift her head to gaze aslant across her shoulders and admire the weightlessness of his approach. She’ll laugh, aloud, against her better judgement with a smile that could rearrange constellations on her face because the sound of her own laughter is still so foreign and it delights her when she gets to hear it for herself.

“You’re in a good mood,” she’ll muse aloud when he is close enough to hear her. Because for once, at least in a long while, she is too.  

 

Eilidh doesn’t find her feet when he drops an anchor next to her. Instead, she leans her head back down into the morning mist and feels it cushioned by the golden grass as she observes, with a dazed interest, a small mound of churned earth that the ants must have dutifully forged in the summer to mask their subterranean cities (cities fueled by the scraps of creatures oh, so much bigger than they). At first she doesn’t feel the melancholy creeping in as she wonders if Moselle has forged cities not unlike these beneath her own mound of churned earth. Maybe there was no decay at all; no bones curled in on themselves in broken ways, lost without the flesh and sinew that held them once.

Maybe all that there was now beneath the wildflowers and the dirt were cities paved with starlight, and maybe, if she stays this still with her ears pressed against the earth forever she’ll get to hear her mother sing even just one more time.

Perhaps she should be less vulnerable in the company of strangers (instead of strewn out naked before them, all the softest parts of her flesh exposed), but fear is something Eilidh has harboured no room for since the last time. In spite of a haunting past, she surrendered quickly to the notion that her time will come when it comes, just like it does for everyone else. And if it’s here, tangled in the long grass with the dappled sunlight on her skin while she dreams about cities lost like Atlantis, then she can think of worse ways to leave.

She went in worse ways.

“Everything is different, but it will always be the same.” He says, and she doesn’t say it, but her heart quietly agrees.

And at last, when she is ready to leave her thoughts on the anthill (another scrap to fuel them, maybe) she looks up at him from the bottom of her dark eyelashes without lifting her face. Eilidh follows his amber eyes to the horizon, but she doesn’t ask him what he is searching for knotted there between the sunlight and the trees; everyone has ghosts. When she looks at him again she decides in the moment that he is striking, in strange and untouchable ways. Scars and divots carved into his flesh let his body tell a story with his most important parts underlined, and it makes her want to know him. It makes her want to reach out with her lips and touch his skin like she can solve his existence if she can only read his body like braille.

Because he looks as though he has seen bigger things than this meadow.
Because he looks as though he’s seen the universe enough times to map out the distance between the constellations.

Because he, with his laughter and the way that he grins like he knows what he is doing - like he’s done it a thousand times before to a thousand faces more beautiful than her own - feels like a light in the darkness. If she knew that he could see inside of her like she was translucent, read her like a book and dog ear all of his favourite pages, she might have felt differently.

“It is good to be home.” He says.

“Welcome home, then,” she answers, warmly, like they are not strangers at all - like he has been lost at sea and has finally come back to her - like she has been missing him all her life. Like it’s rational to associate one foreign laugh, and one glimpse of life without sorrow, all to one stranger.

“I’m Eilidh. Were you gone long?”

 

“Tell me, Eilidh,”

Something inside of her ignites with the sound of her name on his lips, and her ears quiver gently as she lifts her thoughts once again from subterranean cities with starlit walkways (she will always find herself back here, wondering, won’t she?). For as often as she gives her name to strangers she’s never heard it repeated back outloud. As is only natural to Eilidh, she delves further inside of herself to comb her memories and siphon from them the last time.

Of course she ends up with her name spelled out across her tongue.
Of course she ends up at Moselle.

“Why are you still here?”

Maybe he means here, flat against the ground. Maybe he means here, in the meadow, being buried alive by leaves that drown the long grass in bright, red blood. Maybe he means here, on this earth, and there isnt enough time in the world that exists to tell him everything that he is asking of her, but with the warmth of the sun here on her skin, and a cloud of his breath there, smoking out into the sky, she wants to try.

“I wonder that myself, all the time.” She says into the grass.
“My mother, I suppose, is the all encompassing answer.”

Weeks from now she will look back to this day, dissecting every piece of it (the warm, dappled sunlight, the scattered red maple leaves, the way the earth smells mingled with the sweat off his body) as though she is a scientist, as though if she can pull it apart enough to understand she has some small chance in hell of weaving another day just like this one. Despite her introspection, despite her unwillingness to move, she is peaceful in these brisk, autumn moments.

As peaceful as she is capable of being, for now.

So she’ll turn it, looking for clues — looking for evidence that everything about this day and these feelings are real — and all she’ll do is ruin it, warp the memory as she turns it, again and again, by the heat of her hands.

“Everything is different, but it will always be the same,” she says to him, then, as he lays his body next to hers under the boughs of this red maple.

“What did you mean by that?”