hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
At first the world had seemed like a perfect place, a safe place. She can remember being tangled in the grass with her brother, spindle legs that refused to work and bright, new eyes wide enough to swallow entire worlds. She can remember other times, not too much later than the first, times spent tucked beneath her mother’s wings with her brother pressed close to her side and their fathers face smiling down on them. Those were the best times, the right times.
But life changed and the world fractured, and with the world so did her small family.
Dempsey was the first to go, but she didn’t blame him for it. He waited until Oksana was okay again, until the grief and hurt had all but vanished, until the other had returned and she had followed that pull like an ocean tide. Isle had not realized until then the difference between love and in love. Love was safe, in love was the total annihilation of everything else. After Dempsey had gone and Oksana found whatever it was that kept her tethered to Makai, even Wyck disappeared, her perfect, wordless other half. He had always longed for adventure and chasing the sun as it disappeared across the horizon, so even though his absence was like a hole in her chest, it had not been unexpected.
Isle had drifted next. But she lacked all the grace of her family, lacked the buoyancy that kept everyone else afloat. When she drifted, she crashed on shores like a lonely shipwreck leaving bits of herself behind to mark her passing. When her family had fractured apart, so had her heart and that loss gouged great chasms into her already shaky self control. For months she had found it impossible to control the ebb and flow of open minds around her, to shield herself from thoughts that filled her restless nights with nightmares. The loneliness in her chest, that feeling of not belonging, it made her impossibly vulnerable.
With a mind full of noise and static and thoughts she had no business knowing, she disappeared like a wild thing into the deepest parts of the forest, staying there until hers was the only voice she heard in her thoughts. When she emerged again it was to a stony silence, cold and unnatural, and it made her head ache. It was like a muscle clenched so tight, tight enough to bruise and break and still she refused to let go.
Somehow this seemed easier than the alternative.
Ahead there must be a gap in the trees because sunlight filters through the leaves staining the grass a watery gold. For a long while she watches it, long enough that the sun must move in the sky because so does that spot in the grass. But she doesn’t go to it. Instead she stays where she is, her brown and white body tucked uncomfortably against the bark of the tree pressed to her hip. It’s better in the shadow, she thinks with a frown, somehow the world seems smaller here. But her emerald eyes flash with something suspiciously close to loneliness.
Isle
this is all over the place but i swear they will probably possibly get better <3