Little waves our bodies break - Cordis

[Alight]

‘...indebted to you.’

She smiles, and it is desire – plain as day – that crowds her pretty, brown eyes. It sounds like music to her. It sounds like something comforting like...  like something from her childhood. 

(He never said that, she thinks.

But he never had to. It was made so, in the way they formed around each other – not inspite of each other, though she always imagines that growing place must have been cramped with the two of them there, side-by-side.

Because of each other...)

“Magic?” she repeats, swallowing hard and blinking out at this moon, far too close to its sun. “You’re magic!” Were. Are. Quavering like a volcano – or like a song on lips, she is a dormant magician. Alight’s eyes flit to the right and left, then back to this… this… limitless creature. Her mind is a-race, across universes of fantasy – the ones weaved together with Giver, when he was pliable and devoted, before he found her and lost his imagination; the ones she wove herself, in quiet, when he had slinked off into the night… 

(The chains were the first things to come. Smelling like what silver polish might smell like; glittering like so many smelted stars. In the strange, deceitful subconsciousness of sleep, they never felt as if they were made to keep him… but… secure him.)

“I can,” she whispers, her voice an admixture of defensiveness, wonder and distraction, “trust me. It’s like I said!” In the darkness (because night has fallen as completely as it will, now; somewhere, Giver still fails to shine… he only glows) her eyes dart side to side along with the feverish tempo of her thoughts and the movement of her lips, uttering only the tiniest of mutterings now and then.

The fairy had never said so, explicitly (at least, she does not remember – there had been only pain and then relief), but Alight knows, somehow, that she can temper this gift. Indebted is a sweet word, indeed. But a word, only. Her mind grasps at many things – like bows and ribbons to tie around the package; like chains, to secure it. It is like being in the eye of a storm, whose nature she is yet unsure of.

Whose threat is gentle and loving.

Whose name she knows, without a doubt. Plain as day.

Giver.

“I-I can give you back your magic, but I’ll need a favour from you,” she steps closer, her wings tucked to her sides, burning away. “I-I… need someone. You have to give him to me, okay? One way or another.” She tips her head down, shuttering her eyes. What flows between the two of them is not entirely Alight’s, for it is the fairy’s magic, but something from her clings to it as it were a liferaft in a tempestuous sea.

Hope? That seems too kind a thing.

No. It is the lack of it entirely, like hope flung off into the vacuum of deepest darkest space.

Desperation.

She opens her eyes back up, some dampness welling up in the corners. She wonders if the mare can feel it – that shared thing; that ribbon or chain. She is, after all, a magician. “You’ll know, I think, when he and I will need you.”