The gleam of metal stops her, just as it always has.
And she hates herself for looking. She hates herself for needing to know, because she is the one who walked away without looking back, the one who said those final words (I can’t, I can’t.), the one who ruined them over, and over, and over again. But the glint of silver hits her eyes and she blinks and turns her cheek to see, so quick it feels like instinct. Loving her has always felt like instinct. Like she is not in control of her own body. Like she knows that they are poisonous together, but cannot help the magnetism.
‘You,’ she says, and Spyndle feels her heart burning – it’s been so long since she’s heard melody in syllables.
‘Are you real?’
Is she?
It feels like time slows. It feels like dying, and she knows about dying. It feels like she can hear the static in the air around her face. It feels like she can smell every dewy blade of the sweet-grass they stand in. It feels like an opiate, like her heart is hammering against her chest so hard it threatens to break through her ribs, like her eyes are rolling back into her head and she can see nothing and somehow everything. It feels like dying.
It feels like seeing everything she has ever wanted for all of her existence – one last time.
Is she real?
How can she be real when she haunts this meadow, their memories, like a ghost? How can she be real when she feels invisible? How can she be real when she cut away the only parts that made her alive? But it hurts. It hurts, and that’s how she knows it can’t be death. It hurts, and that’s how she knows it must be real – that she is real. She hurts worse than spilt blood and innards. She hurts worse than a vivisection. She hurts worse than flesh and bone split open.
“No,” she answers at last, and she casts her dark eyes towards the horizon because lying is sometimes the only way out.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know
<333 I love you and Cordis.