In the pale frost of October he’ll find her beneath the bleeding boughs of a red maple tree, lain out with the warmth of her side pressed flat across the meadow grass and grounded leaves. The clouds of her breath will roll away from her as she exhales the sweet smell of wet decay like plumes of smoke even though there is no fire inside of her. The fire is all around them instead, because here the grass looks gold instead of green when the morning sunlight washes across it the way that it does, and the leaves along the meadows edge flicker like the breath of fire as they shake in a crosswind -- yellow, and red, and orange, and alive.
There’s a sharpness to the air that mingles with the cold, and it brings something forgotten in Eilidh to life. Stretched out against the grass, her flesh slick with dew and cradled by the morning mist, she isn’t feeling the weight of sorrow. She isn’t existing with her eyes closed, thinking about the stars, or how she can realign them to conjure the lines of her mother’s beautiful face. There’s not enough time to translate into words all the ways that she is feeling, but the easiest explanation is that today she is simply lost in the warmth of the sunlight that reaches down to find her skin between the eyelets of the leaves.
And she is warmed right to the marrow.
And she’ll hear him coming before he’ll ever notice her there amongst the long grass. She’ll lift her head to gaze aslant across her shoulders and admire the weightlessness of his approach. She’ll laugh, aloud, against her better judgement with a smile that could rearrange constellations on her face because the sound of her own laughter is still so foreign and it delights her when she gets to hear it for herself.
“You’re in a good mood,” she’ll muse aloud when he is close enough to hear her. Because for once, at least in a long while, she is too.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Set] Hope this is okay! I couldn't resist posting, and the other thread was a little chaotic for me.
