swallow my doubt,turn it inside out

[Alight]

It never occurs to her to ask him where he has been. 

Not right away.

Time has been rearranged and those minutes, or hours – maybe days – of separated wandering (as if in some ashen world, apart and lit dimly by wild hopes, or nothing at all) had stretched into an oblivion. Had reached into forever and sampled something dark and scary. So she lets him take her in. He smells of such sweet, comfortable familiarity (his own hair, and it reminds her of pine even if the long months had scraped it roughly from his coat) that she cannot be mad. She cannot be hurt or worried.

Besides, she is painfully self-absorbed. Has always been, though never maliciously. In a sort of childlike way that is never charming, but sometimes tolerated. But if it is not herself that occupies her mind, it has always been them  – mother, father, Giver, Victra, Ivo, Roque, Milia. Them and their tales, like storybooks bound in same-flesh. Princess and princes; damsels and knights; Kings and Queens. She presses her nose into his shoulder and she does not know that he is not hers, nor is she his – it would have mattered little, in any case.

Because she needs him.

She needs him too badly right now.

When he speaks, it does not register. 

Not right way.

It tickles something in her mind, and her brow, perhaps, creases a bit. Somehow she is willing to see past it – or is willing herself to – because she has not tumbled and marched and worried this long and hard only to find him so absent. She cannot. He cannot. And she can see, perhaps, why he might be in a daze. A passing kind of symptom of the malady they were all shaking off. “What do you mean?” she smiles, even giggles a bit, staying hugged into him, “of course you do, silly.” It could almost not matter. In the moment, she simply needs him, but in a few more – in an hour or a day – she'll need much more than just that. It is when he sighs, heavy and muddled, that she lifts her nose from him and looks up into his eyes and sees such nothing stare back.

Confusion.

Struggle.

There is no recognition, but the hazy want to know (again). As if he fingers the rich blue hair, curls it between his fingers and divines in the colour, looking for her name and the names of others like her. She feels the gentle touch on her neck and she turns her bright eyes towards it, responds to it with such knowing yield. It had rocked her and warmed her, sometimes chastised her. She opens her mouth to speak her love, but the moment is hitched. ‘But I don’t know where your Mother is, should I worry?’ She blinks fat tears from her eyes and sniffs, looking back to father, searching for some understanding. For some way in which his words can make sense, be made to be right and okay. “Wha–,”

She yields, again, so easily and because she wants to (so, so badly) be away from him. Because she loves him so, but he scares her like this – she wants to withdrawal and hide until it is better, so she can redo this whole thing. (She would say ‘father!’, he would say ‘Alight!’, and they would find mother together. And then all, come together in a pack, would find Giver.) With a remote kind of gawk she drifts against her mother’s blue body, and is home. And suddenly his absence is illuminated, an extension of the suffering. It had been so long. She had danced and tittered on, with and without Giver, and the enormity of it had never sunk in.

It does now, because he is not back.

Not quite yet.

“Mother?” it is a quiet, almost rhetorical, appeal, like a toddler behind her skirt and appealing to her, ‘what is wrong?’