She knows the way eyes feel when they settle on the bark of her dark uneven body, can remember the way it felt when once upon a yesterday, the hairs along her slender spine stood on end. So she waits a beat before she looks up, giving those eyes the chance to move on because she can of course understand the urge to stare. She is strange by any standard, odd by any definition. But the feeling doesn't pass, and finally she lifts those shy petal pink eyes to find him. But the sight of him is like a lightning strike to her chest, and she is so sure that if she is brave enough to look down, she’ll find a hollowed mess of splinters gaping back up at her.
He is the boy from her childhood, the one she died to protect - would die for again one hundred times over even knowing what it is she becomes. He is the silver of every star in every sky, he is the raw ore buried in glimpses behind dark coal stone. He is the smoky black of half-night and the absence of light, he is the blue of sapphires she has never seen and never has to because she knows without a doubt that he is brighter.
He is Nikolaus.
He is the boy that will forever hold the heart that no longer exists inside her chest.
He is home.
So it is a wonder that she does not immediately know him when she looks up from her sad violets and the song they break her heart with. That this flash of silver jolts something locked inside her memory - a kind of guarded recognition, but it isn’t this face half concealed by shadow and fully grown. Her mind remembers a boy with gentler features and an easier smile, with laughter on his lips and in the ore of his eyes. She knows him, but not this version of him. Not the man he became without her, and somehow it is too jarring to reconcile.
Yet.
Something inside her is a tide to the pull of his moon, and she cannot take her eyes off of him for fear of falling away into an oblivion without this new gravity. She takes a single step towards him, and then pauses again when the leaves rise and find a new life she cannot detect, a new depth she cannot feel. She watches, blinking those pale eyes like pink tourmaline, fighting tears that will never fall for memories she is so afraid to take hold of.
But she knows, she knows.
There is such pain as she reaches down to touch the dancing autumn leaves, letting them brush across the bark of her nose, his sudden appearance restoring an old ache inside her chest. To be touched, held. To feel a warmth long since stolen, a warmth gifted away for a far better cause. Her face lifts again to find him, and there is pain and relief in every knot and whorl as she closes her eyes to hold the perfect memories of him inside where they will always be kept safe. “You look very much like a ghost I once knew.”
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
