She crashes against him like a wave.
But as they collide, he does not crumble like the shore. Instead, he is fortified by her presence, made stronger in her wake. He feels her push the last stone building his courage into place when she slides under his neck. It will not fall apart like Beqanna had, not again. The mountains may tumble, the seas may drain, the stars may fall – but he will remain unchanged.
The moon is his witness; he will not flinch away from her again.
His resolve is as brand-new as the back-drop of their lives. She will see it, in the hard set of his chin (the only outward defense against her physicality). She will feel it, in the way he softens otherwise (the way he lets her melt into him, fill all the spaces between them). Walter brushes the top of her neck with his muzzle and smells the sea. He remembers the travelers who had tracked north with the brine-scent trailing them; he wonders if she’s gone there and come back. He hopes she’s come back, at least for him.
Her smile lights up the night and pulls him from his musing. Djinni is happier than she was before, he thinks, happier than he’s ever seen her. She is more herself, too. Her unique brand of magic still thrums in the air between them (and he bets she’s kept hers’ all along, defying the reckoning when no one else could) but she doesn’t use it to morph herself. She is her natural wisp of smoke; he breathes her in. “I’ve missed you, too.” The golden stallion pulls away from her, but only to better see her face, to gauge her reaction. “As much as the desert misses the sun when it passes behind a cloud.” One corner of his dusky lips rises in a crooked smirk because it is heresy and they both know it.
But there are mysteries that even her smile cannot better illuminate. There is a dark stretch of time that bridges raven feathers and sap to spinning stars and brand-new resolve. He’d traversed it perhaps like the eager others had the mist, stumbling and groping his way through. Walter starts to ask her where’s she’s been, what she’s seen; he opens his mouth and promptly shuts it again. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, we have all the time in the world to see it again, together. Because he doesn’t want to be left behind or run ahead of her or whatever had separated them in the first place. This time, he won’t let the mists swallow him, won’t pull back into the cover of the trees. Except,
“Take me to the ocean,” he says, already picturing the pink waves at dawn. It doesn’t matter how long she’s been there or been away from the sea; he only wants this last memory with her, to push away the rest – to forget those days he spent alone. The meadow seems stale now, clustered with too many bodies taking too many breathes. He wants to feel the salt-breeze cooling his neck. He wants to sink into the sand as he walks along the shore, to leave a parallel pair of tracks as the sun climbs in the sky above them. “Please don’t make me stay here any longer.”
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long
ooc: s'okay. apparently he is in need of many hugs. I don't even know what this is