Did Cordis know that she had wanted to stay?
She had wanted to stay.
She had wanted to stay for all of her life, and even one death. She had wanted to stay even when the river ate her corpse and the fog ate her memory. She had wanted to stay even as her blood poured out against the river stones, and her children writhed against her own spilled innards. She had wanted to stay even when every moment of their existence together was agony, even if every living god willed them separate, even if one was the sun and the other the moon.
She had wanted to stay.
She would always want to stay.
‘You’re back,’ Cordis says, beautiful because she always would be.
Spyndle flinches like those two syllables are sharp, because even though she can’t see red she knows she must be bleeding.
“That’s what ghosts do,” Spyndle answers.
“They come back.”
Does he know that she had wanted to stay?
She had wanted to stay.
It only took one moment. It was that single, irregular moment when their pulses synced and their breaths aligned and exchanged. She breathed him into her lungs and fell hard instead of logically. This is her curse, blown through her gold flesh, whispered through her bones, and wrought from the strands of her DNA – her beginning and her Elysium. It only took one moment. It only took that symphony of ravens, and her heart pouring water for the holes. It only took a single touch gloved with a few pretty words, and she saw the flicker of hope against the black of everything else. She had wanted to drown in black feathers, to fill her lungs with them and him. She had wanted to lean in tight against his bones – because he was tangible, because he was real, because he had not lied, yet.
And she had wanted him like the need were a sickness.
She hadn’t said it then with words.
She’d swallowed them.
She’d said it with her closeness; how every second that they touched could roll the mountains of her spine like waves on an ocean, and how every quiver of her muscle wrote his name against the sinew of her tendons.
When he appears she looks at him like she did that day, and hopes he remembers all of it.
And she’ll say nothing, because she won’t know where to stay.
Her lips will part softly, but the words will catch in her throat as though they’re barbed – and maybe they are, because these aren’t lovers anymore, because these are familiar strangers. Because she’s mapped out the roads of their bodies, and remembers the smell of fervor on their flesh, because she knows what sweat looks like when it beads and rolls from their furrowed brows like rain, but not where they were yesterday. She won’t know what to say to them, because they told her things like ‘always’, but she does not know them now.
“You’re different,” will be the four syllables she decides on – because they’re violent, because they’re made of electricity and magma, of hurricane winds, and they weren’t always.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know
;_; i love you guys