She gasps when he appears before her like a ghost plucked from one of her nightmares. Just like when she had seen Sleaze in the meadow with the color on his skin and the ghosts in his eyes, she knows that she has found another one. Another what though? For a long moment she says nothing, her jaw clenched far too tight to allow for words to slip past like whispered secrets. But the wait, this silence, it’s almost worse than the way she rehashes these thoughts, these memories that stick to the inside of her mind like burrs.
“Me.” She agrees when her muscles slacken enough for her lips to shape around that single word. “And you.” She thinks of Sleaze again, of how neither had found another like themselves until they had found each other, of how hard it was to understand, to believe, and how impossible it had been to say goodbye to him and return to the Chamber alone. Alone. For who else could possibly ever understand her heart like he could, who else could recognize her indigo as a flaw, a scar. And yet she had left, she had found the strength.
But it was like this nightmare would never been done with her, these ghosts would always find her. Impossibly, ironically, it made her feel less lonely.
She looks down at herself, at the mud caked around the blue. “It’s ugly.” She tells him in a whisper when she lifts her head again, and there is new pain, new regret etched into the delicate hollows of her dark face. “Ugly.” She says again because she needs to explain, even quieter, caught in the word like a bug in a web. And she doesn’t mean the dirt, not the mud, she means the blue that still hadn’t faded, the blue that stained her skin like an impossible scar.
And just as with Sleaze, when the trembling starts in the marrow of her bones, she goes to him. She pushes her mouth against his jaw, tasting the tension, steps closer and presses her chest against his. It’s so much easier when she can’t see their faces, can’t see their ghosts (and hers) staring hungrily back at her. Her mouth falls against his shoulder, her cheek against his mane, “We’re impossibilities.”
MALIS
makai x oksana