that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
He could open his eyes, he knows, but there is a piece of him that does not want to find what it might be. He believes that this is a dream—but he does not know for certain. Does not know that he is indeed trapped in the dreamscape of her own making. That he has somehow managed to trip past the outskirts of his own consciousness into a place where he is not the master or the creator but just a pawn within it.
(He would not mind, does not mind. Not when the creation is so sweet.)
Still—it is not easy to relinquish his control, his need to run, and he is afraid of what he will find when he does open his eyes. Would she be staring down at him in the form that finds him at midnight? He does not feel that ash in his mouth, the hollow bones. He does not feel the absence of life in him—the way that his blood runs cold and thick, like sludge in his veins. But he cannot know for sure.
Perhaps it is a trick.
He does not want to confirm that she is seeing him like that.
So his eyes remain closed and he just listens to the silver bells of the mysterious girl’s voice. He lets it wash over him like a balm and he sinks into the space between the conscious and the not. Lets himself get lost in the daze, the gauzy middle. His body flickers again, barely hanging onto its place next to her.
“I am not afraid,” he starts, that rough voice barely there but hold on, “of you, at least.” Another groan in the back of his throat as he stretches, wondering at the relief he finds in the motion. (He could not be dead, he thinks, when it feels so certainly like blood flooding his veins.) “I don’t want to open my eyes and for it all to fade away,” a confession—something he would never give if he was awake.
This, more than anything, convinces him. His guard would never be so low in the real world. He would have found his armor by now—not sunk into the quicksand of this vulnerability.
So, finally, he pulls himself slightly more upward.
He angles toward her and then his molten gold eyes open to finds her.
“What are you then?”
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
