and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
What it must be like to be him, she thinks in sadness as her cheek rests against him in the quiet pool of their strange union. What it must be like to hurt as he seems to, the crazed edge of his words seeming to affirm in the back of her mind that something was wrong. But not wrong in the way one would expect. She picked up on the danger of him, the brokenness of his tongue, but it did not drive her away as she was instinctually meant to; instead, she just holds him closer and her heart breaks.
“What is the purple,” she questions into his skin and feels the warmth of her own breath roll across it and then back against her. And then: “Please don’t apologize.” He was correct in thinking that she did not know why the apology was born, but she did not need to: she just didn't want it. She didn’t need him to gift her with an apology; she just wanted him to feel at ease, to relax, to knit himself back together again.
Her eyes close and she takes a deep breath, the sound of her mouth sucking in the air breaking the tension between them, all of the unspoken ghosts seemingly haunting them both. “What is your dream, Sleaze?” she asks, slightly out of curiosity and slightly to redirect their conversation. “I would like to go home some day,” she confesses, because it seems like the kind of conversation where truths were just needed. “But I don’t think that I can.” A moment of silence.
“I don't even think I have a home anymore.”
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang