She’s dreamed of this and tried not to.
Because in the dreams, things work, planets align. They are not unstoppable force and immovable object both, they are simply lovers. In dreams, they meet and they stay together, and the magnetism that draws them near is not the very thing that repels them.
In dreams, there is not lightning, no Him, no ‘I can’t.’
She’s dreamed of this and tried not to because dreams turn to easy to nightmares, where she is stained in her blood, whispering come back, come back for me, but it’s not enough. She is not enough. In nightmares, where there is a turned back and a heavy weight of impossibility, where she wakes haunted by her eyes.
She wants to tell her things, every wonderful and horrible thing that’s happened to her. She wants nothing hidden, and what’s hidden now is the way she hurt the boy, the way it felt good to hurt him.
(“Do you want to know a secret?”)
Please let me go, she says, and it hurts her heart to hear it. She should. She knows this, the way she knew it every time – walk away. Do not look back.
Ah, but they are so often liars.
“Please,” she says, but doesn’t know what she’s asking for. Too much and nothing at all.
Another moment, another breath to take her in, to have this moment, this memory.
She touches her muzzle to Spyndle, down her neck. She is reverent, she is shaking, and the lightning that encased her is gone, she is simply silver again, like she was when they had first met. As if they could go back.
Ah, but there is no going back, no looking back.
“I hurt someone,” she confesses, because she needs to tell her, “and it felt right.”
Hurt people hurt people, the saying goes, but it had been more than that. The boy had been a catalyst, an affirmation that it was a pleasure to burn, he had soaked up her lightning and pain and for a moment there had been peace, before horror marched in to lay claim as she gazed at the boy’s ruined skin.
She is still touching her because she has touched her so rarely, she is like an artifact unearthed, and part of her worries that Spyndle will shatter beneath her.
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)