‘What do you see?’
‘Ghosts.’

If he did not remember, it would not have been the first time.

She is one of one thousand. She is one of so many that he counts them now like loose change, casually and without delicacy, learning the roads of their bodies for just long enough to map the lefts and rights of them out on canvas before blazing new trails in all the time it takes for the hands of a watch to spin from twelve to twelve. So if he forgot, if he fell shy of her memory, if he lost the flavor of the syllables in her name spelled out on his tongue, it would still be okay. It would be all right. It would be normal.

If he did not remember it would not have been the first time.
But he does.

She had smelled like the ashes of an empire he had held on his shoulders for too long.

She smelled like the settled smoke of a fire that consumed until there was nothing left but the bones of structures that once were homes. The sweat on her skin was raw and sweet, but real, more tangible than most things in those moments. She didn’t remind him of the pyres. She didn’t remind him of the graves that he had dug out. She smelled like torn up beaches and aftershocks. She smelled like galaxies and beginnings. She was not a kingdom, an empire built of shit. She was not red like the sunset, didn’t hate him like she should have. She was the antithesis of everything else.

She wasn’t Margaery.



‘What do you see?’
‘Ghosts.’


He had met her in the dark. They curled together like tessellating mosaics, swaddled beneath a blanket of galaxies and black velvet that seemed to roll out of the horizon infinitely, filling the emptiness of the skies like the last yellowed light of sunset. He didn’t want it. She touched him, and he had let her. He didn’t want it. She touched him, and he had been full of holes and bleeding heat through his skin like ice water pouring through the fissures of glaciers. He didn’t want it – but she touched him, and he was full and warm and forgetful.

He didn’t owe her an ‘ever-after’.
He had told her to run. He had told her to run fast.

He had told her that he saw ghosts – that he might even be one himself. He had told her, but then his lips had grazed that soft patch of skin behind her ear, and he’d exhaled breath that was warm and spilt across the expanse of her flesh like paint, soaking and staining all of the land on her body it ate up. He told her not to love him, and then he devoured her. He told her not to love him, and then he breathed her deep into his lungs like a cancer. He told her. He asked her. He told her not to love him, and all the while he thought about how nice it could be if she did – because love made him important. Love made him something wanted. Love took away the memories. Love made him someone else’s fate instead of mistake.

“What do you see?” He asks, instead of spilling out her name into the echo of the meadow. He holds that secret in the back of his throat, because if he says her name it means he remembers, because if he says her name it means that the night when he held the maps of her body in his palms that it meant more than just coordinates.