hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
The silence seems to stretch on and on and it suddenly feels impossible to hold his red gaze for any longer. Her dark eyes part from his, blinking once, twice, and she turns her face instead to trace the brown trees that were no longer bare, no longer stiff and skeletal for the way green life budded along those spindled branches. The branches split the blue of an honest, aching sky and they remind her of the pink, puckered scars etched into the black of this strangers skin. She would’ve turned to look back at him, to trace those marks with the soft of her whiskered lips but something held her back, something uncertain smothered that quiet curiosity. New thoughts, not hers - or maybe they were just old ones trapped by her own toxic fear – echoed inside her mind and she flinched again but said nothing. She imagined she could taste their tears and smell that copper stink of spilled blood, and she couldn’t, not really, but these thoughts made her heart ache all the same. She was a brittle thing, a delicate creature not designed for war or chaos, easily cowed by wrath and cruelty. A shiver races along her spine and she abruptly turns her face back to his, her dark eyes uncertainly soft where they settled against him.
“You’re quiet,” she says, she whispers, and then, “I make you uncomfortable.” It seems a preposterous notion but she feels certain she is right, and if only he knew, if only he knew. But she hates so much to say it aloud, to announce herself because it is always in the way thunder precedes a storm and everyone disappears to take cover. No one liked to know that she was a pit-pocket of thoughts, no one ever believed that she didn’t want their shame and their secrets bleeding into her own. So she doesn’t say it, not yet.
Instead she edges closer with a look of wounded curiosity etched into shadow of her angular dark brown face. With the soft of her white and pink nose she stretches to push aside the tangled ropes of forelock that slip over to conceal the burning red of his eyes. Whatever it is she is searching for in his face she must find, because her expression softens and when she pulls away again there is a not-quite smile ghosting at the corners of her delicate lips. “Different from others.” She says quietly when he finally finds words for her, and that subtle smile sinks a little deeper into the curve of her mouth. Her brow furrows beneath the windswept curls of her black forelock and she cocks her head slightly at him considering. “Some minds leak, or maybe mine does. Maybe I’m what doesn’t work right.” She pauses to chew at her lower lip, turning her face from him so that he might not notice the unwilling, unshared secrets floating in the bottoms of her dark eyes. “But not yours. Yours is different.”
Somehow it feels like she has shared so much with him and the feeling makes her skin crawl with discomfort, but she knows that even now she keeps the most important piece of secret for herself. It seems silly because he has probably already guessed it, but somehow it feels like pulling a knife from her own chest and placing it in his hand when she finally says in a shattered voice, “I am a mindreader.”
Isle
