hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
He touches her, his lips to the curve of her cheek and all at once her heart resumes its hammering in her chest. But it’s different this time because it is not fear that courses like ice through her veins; it is fire. Searing heat like a hundred swallowed suns, and this time when her dark eyes fall on him they are changed. She inhales sharply, a quiet gasp that catches in her throat. When he pushes aside the curls of her forelock just as she had done his, her eyes settle against his like anchors and for a moment she is tethered there. Her brow furrows and hesitation lingers in the quiet of her small, dark face but still she says nothing. She is busy in this instant, this heartbeat in time, busy tracing patterns on a face she had never known before but guessed she would not soon forget. There is something unexpectedly kind waiting for her there in those shadows, something that even now seems to quiet the nerves tangling and untangling like worrying fingers in the pit of her belly.
This scares her.
There have only been a few things in her life that she had hoped to be permanent, but each one of the things had eventually drifted out of reach. Her father had disappeared, ever the wanderer, and with him her twin brother Wyck. Sometimes she wondered if they had gone together, if they were still together, but this notion equally soothed and flayed open her vulnerable heart. She was so like her father, they were both mind readers, and of course Wyck was her other half, but both had left her. Both had gone. Her mother was somewhere, always somewhere in her eternality but Isle felt like she had chosen to spend that eternality with another family. Perhaps in the deepest part of her flayed open soul, Isle blamed her mother for Wyck and Dempsey leaving.
She blamed her mother for loving someone else more.
Isle flinched imperceptibly, her dark eyes flashing with a kind of pain he would not understand if he had noticed at all. It always hurt when her thoughts slipped back to her shattered family, a family that no longer existed. It hurt to remember that her home was wherever the thoughts were quietest, the pit of a lonely forest with no sky above, a place with no family and no friends to betray when their thoughts spilled into hers as soon as she let her guard down.
You cannot read mine. He says and she is pulled instantly from the dark depths of her quiet brooding. She does not answer right away, instead slipping even closer to trace a particularly gruesome scar that sat pink and puckered like a tear in his chest. Her lips find it easily and she outlines its jagged shape, his heart rumbling somewhere below. “Maybe.” She confesses with a frown as she pulls back from his chest, from his heart. “Maybe I could read it.” She is silent again while she struggles to find an explanation for him that would make any sense at all. “It’s like this. If you were to close your eyes, you would still be able to feel the sun on your face, there is still light that bleeds through and illuminates your eyelids.” She pauses to see if he’s following, or if he does finally think she must be losing her mind. “Now imagine you’ve kept your eyes closed for years, and suddenly it’s there all around you and it is brighter than it has ever been before. And you can’t help it, you can’t stop it, you just look. But you know you’ve been tricked even before you see the sun because it is only the dark that waits for you.”
She seems to shrink and crumple and wilt before him, touching her lips to the side of his mouth greedily before pulling away even further because she knows he’ll want her to go now. “I can always feel the pressure of someone’s mind like sun on my face. I think there is an instinctive part of me that wants to look inside, a reflex because this isn’t extra for me. It is me.” Her voices drops away, severed by pain as she remembers the earliest mind she had fallen into, willing at first until she wasn’t anymore. “I try not to look anymore; I don’t want to know these things. But sometimes I can’t stop it.” Her eyes drop to her feet, to the muddied ground below them before she continues. “I think maybe your mind wants to be as alone as mine does.”
She traces the crescent imprint of someone’s hoof in the dirt for a long while before she allows his next words to pull her gaze back to his. Years and years, he says and she finds her eyes drawn back to his scars as she wonders just how many years. Her brow furrows and she aches to slip closer, and even as she wills the same from him there is a fear in her belly that begs him away. It is the fear born of knowing what it means to lose someone you care for too deeply. He speaks again and her dark eyes widen where they land on his face, uncertainty tightening the angles of her dark head. Her voice is the sound of a dozen moth wings, gentle and imploring when she asks, “Will you tell me anyway?” And then even as fear tightens in her gut, dread weeping from the marrow of her delicate bird-bones, “My name is Isle.”
Isle
