Golden eyes watching our every move
Losing time without the sun or moon

She’d closed him out, and he doesn’t know why. He’d tried to understand, but he cannot. He has never been very good at seeing and knowing, at recognizing what lay beneath the surface. Not like his sister, who could look at another and know their soul. He’d almost asked her, but he hadn’t. He’d felt too foolish, as though he doesn’t even know his own mind. If he does not know his own, how could he expect to understand another?

But he had stayed close. He couldn’t seem to help himself. The shadows wrap so comfortingly around him, ancient friends that always welcome him in their cool embrace, no matter how far he might stray. They are simple and constant, easy to understand. They do not place a vice around his heart and run rough fingers through his mind, scrambling his thoughts until he is not entirely sure he had remembered things correctly.

He’d tried to go to her at first. Quickly though (too quickly), it had become clear she had not wished to see him. She had avoided the shadows, the darkness and the quiet corners that he calls his own. Had he been less uncertain, he might have braved the light. Might have ignored the way it burns his skin and pierces his eyes just to speak with her. But this is too new to him, still too foreign. Sometimes he wonders if he even knows up from down. Sometimes he wonders if he had only been imagining things. Perhaps what they had shared had only been in his head.

Still he watches, keeping to his shadows, unseen, undetectable, hoping that perhaps he’d been wrong. It’s easier in the night, when darkness abounds and shadows touch nearly every piece of land and not just the depths of the forest. He sees her nightmares, pieces of himself dying just a little bit each time he must watch knowing he cannot interfere. She hadn’t wished to see him, and he would respect her wishes, even when it hurt to do so.

He made sure she was never in danger. That much at least, he could do. That much he could give without her knowing.

He is there tonight too, when the nightmare takes hold. He aches as he watches her, resisting the urge to step from his shadows. To draw her close and take away her fears. He would battle her demons if he could. He’d fought the monsters of nightmares in the past and won. He would gladly do so again, if it gave her peace. But it’s not his place.

She’s not his. Not really. Not anymore.

He stills when his name escapes her lips, almost not daring to believe she had asked for him. Why now? Why tonight?

The answer to those questions doesn’t seem to matter though. He would always be there if she asked. After a moment, he releases the veil he’d used to shield himself. The shadow-dark pitch of his skin blends so perfectly into the night that, to the observer, it might appear as if nothing had changed. Only the bright, golden-yellow sheen of his gaze would give any indication of his presence, peering eerily from the darkness.

For a moment, he can only stare at her, his heart thudding inside his chest as emotion clogs his throat. Finally, he whispers her name. “Briseis.” Barely a thread of sound, almost indiscernible from the trembling notes of the music made by nocturnal creatures.

ether

Golden eyes watching our every move
Losing time without the sun or moon

It feels like ages he stands there, simply staring at her. An eternity lost in her endless gaze, shadowed by thoughts and emotions he cannot even begin to guess at. He’s never been good at emotion, and hers are as much a mystery to him as his own so often are.

But she breaks the spell when she moves closer, an apology on her lips. She moves slowly, hesitantly, as though uncertain what her reception might be. He would always forgive her though, no matter how often she pushed him away. It is not in his nature to harbor resentment or anger. And he could never pretend to know her thoughts. Perhaps he had mistaken what was between them that day. Perhaps it had only ever been him.

He could never hold something that may have only been his wild imaginings against her. He could never try to cage her in his own ideals. Such a thing would be hollow at best. Empty and terrible, if she did not choose him, of her own volition. And she hadn’t. Still, he hadn’t been able to abandon her. Foolish perhaps, but then he’s always been infinitely foolish. He had given himself to her, and it is not something he would take back so lightly.

He feels hope though. She had asked for him, and perhaps that would be enough. His gaze remains fixed on her, longing and hope and hurt all tangled together, a snarled web of emotion he can’t seem to decipher. He remains silent as she speaks, his heart leaping erratically in his chest when she admits she had missed him. It takes him a moment to find the words, his mind already leaping at that persistent hope.

“I missed you too,” he says softly, an ache nearly audible in the words. He steps closer, wanting nothing so much as the draw her into his embrace. She apologizes again, and he draws closer, nearly touching now. He wants to touch her, but he needs her to tell him she wants him to. To tell him he hadn’t been imagining things. So instead he skims his nose over her shoulder, a bare breath away from her skin. “Why… did you… “

Hide from me, he wants to say, but the words never quite leave his lips.

Suddenly he stills, inhaling deeply for the first time. There is something subtly different in her scent. It had changed, something new affecting it. It takes him a moment to recognize it, to put the pieces together. At first he knows surprise, a thread of delight, his mind going to the night they had spent together. But another breath brings confusion, and another recognition, followed so closely by bewilderment that they may as well be the same.

He withdraws slightly, as though he might erase her scent from his lungs, the knowledge it had brought, even as his gut hollows  and his mind scrambles to find another explanation.

He’s mistaken. He must be.

ether

Golden eyes watching our every move
Losing time without the sun or moon

For a few silent breaths, he can hear only the clamorous echoes of his own thoughts, his own confusion. Impossible to sort into any coherency, but still digging claws deep into the ache in his chest. He’s so foolish. So incredibly naive to believe that she might have belonged to him. To believe that there wasn’t someone else.

He takes another step back, shaking his head as though it might clear his thoughts. As though it might erase the memory of her scent, still hers, but changed. Wrong. All wrong.

Her words only tighten the knot in his chest, scraping the edges of the hollow pit in his stomach. If breath had been necessary, he would have been choking on it. I made a mistake. The words, so quietly whispered, are like a sledgehammer to his heart, crushing whatever hope he’d had left that she hadn’t been avoiding him on purpose. That it wasn’t him. That somehow, with time and patience, he could fix it.

“A mistake,” he echoes hollowly, the brightness of his golden eyes dimming, his voice, still impossibly soft, falling flat. “I see.”

He’d been a mistake for her, nothing more. A night that had changed his life had only been a mistake to her. He thought he’d known pain and loneliness before, but it was nothing compared to the weight that settles on his soul in the wake of her confession.

He takes another step backwards, his gaze dropping to the ground, unable to meet hers. Unable to bear the weight of her regret. It’s clear now he had intruded where he was not wanted. So clear now that she wished only to be with whoever had fathered her child. Closing his eyes, he takes another step back, her apologies feeling as empty and hollow as he does.

He swallows hard, fighting back the tears that threaten. He should go. He doesn’t know why she’d asked for him, but it’s clear he is not wanted here. Still, despite everything, he cannot hate her or wish her pain. She should have her happiness, even if he cannot have his. “Please be happy with him, at least,” he finally whispers, unable to hide the anguish in his voice, despite his best efforts. “It’ll be a beautiful baby, if it’s anything like you.”

His voice wavers over the last, but it hardly matters. He’s already pulling the shadows around him, disappearing into the ether. His parents had named him so aptly, hadn’t they? It seems it would be the only place that always welcomed him without question.

ether