hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She remains tucked close to his side, but her eyes are closed and her head is bowed beneath the intensity of the thoughts that rush in to replace her own. Dead, murdered. She takes a shaky breath and hardly notices when the edge of her narrow shoulder presses against the black of his side as she leans into him. Oh God, I’m alone. A sound like a mangled whimper escapes the crumble of her chest to fall like ash from her trembling lips. I’ll kill him, I’ll kill them all. She can feel stones piling up in her chest, crushing her bones, her ribs, her heart beneath their cold, impossible weight. The thoughts feel dirty in her mind, like snow so grey it could be ash, and all because they aren’t hers but somehow they fit perfectly within her head. Her jaw clenched tightly, drawing lines along her cheek and beneath her eyes as she pressed her face into the nearest thing. His warm, thick shoulder. The warmth gave her pause and she remembered suddenly where she stood, and with whom, and she pulled away from him reflexively with uncertainty etched into the brilliant dark of her worried eyes.
But when he speaks his voice is not cold and cruel, it is not like the voices of the thoughts swimming in her mind. She stills a little and her face is still uncertain, but it is softer now and she does not continue to drift further from him. We’re burning. She flinches and turns her delicate face from him so he cannot see the way her eyes unfocus and swim with the headache burgeoning inside her skull. When she does look back to him her face is full of shadow and she tucks her chin timidly towards her narrow brown chest. She did not want to tell him anything for fear that if she started she would tell him everything. But she knew it wasn’t fair to have crashed against him in the pit of her fears, to have taken his warmth for her own and expect him to let her stay with no explanation. She floundered a little and new distress blossomed like bruises in the bottoms of her wide, dark eyes. “I-” her voice trembles a little, just a quiet thrum of sound to match the racing thrum of her heart, “the war. I can hear them.” She winces and flinches when she hears herself and the way this confession must make no sense. She exhales sharply and her chest feels like it might cave in beneath the weight of the uncertainty blossoming there. “In my head,” she tries again and she doesn’t meet his eyes this time, “they’re trapped inside my head.” She is already so impossibly small beside him, all delicate bones and narrow angles against his weight and bulk, but she shrinks further still. “I promise I’m not crazy.” She breathes, pulling her lip between the flat of her teeth.
Something occurs to her then, it tickles the back of her mind impatiently until she finally pays it any attention. But as soon as she did, worry painted itself in dark shadow across her delicate brown face. “I can’t-” she stumbles inelegantly over her words, those eyes wider still when they fell against the burning red of his own, “not yours.” Her face softens imploringly as she wills him to understand, to believe her, to not cast her back out into the savage chaos of her unraveling mind. But then her jaw clenches tightly again in a way that shatters any softness that had appeared there in the moments before. “You’re different. I don’t know why.”
Isle
