and when i breathed
my breath was lightning
She doesn’t blame Kora for the storm that rages around them. It’s how Rhy feels every day, and if the electric inside her weren’t so deadly, the storm would never end. The sky would crack and bleed with lightning if she let her emotions out. But while winter is cold and painful, Rhy in this moment is dead, and she can’t feel the cold. Can’t feel the icy winds that howl around them, or the snow that doesn’t settle on her back but passes through. She would simply be crying too, if ghosts had any tears to cry.
She knows it’s safer in this form, safer to stay a ghost. Not just because she’s safe from the bitter winter of her sister’s pain, but because if she weren’t ghost, the tears would roll down her face. As it is, its all Rhy can do to keep from wrapping her sister in a hug, but for her sister and for herself. She wants, desperately, in that moment for them to be fully normal. She wants them to be able to comfort each other, and where comfort fails, to simply crumble together. Because life is always easier when there’s someone to share the pain with.
Lagertha had no sympathy, nor Scorch. Not really, anyway. Scorch had too much of her own pain to bear, and Lagertha no reference to what life is like with loving parents. Rhy didn’t blame them. And Kratos? She could have broken down and cried, and he would have let her. But with him, she is stronger, capable of staying together even as the world threatens to split open beneath her feet. With him, she cannot imagine crying. But as the blades of grass freeze around her, she wishes more than anything she could simply stop being strong, for just a minute.
But that has never been an option for Rhy. That will never be an option.
But she understands her sister’s pain. Rhy had dreamed of the day they would return, had dreamed of a life where her parents saw what she had become, saw how far Kora and she had come. They were supposed to come back. They were supposed to find the girl they left so many years ago, and maybe then, they could be a family again. Maybe finally, she could have the family she mostly remembered in dreams.
Her sister reigns the storm back in, with only one question. Though that one question, that one word, is a million questions all at once. And in this, Rhy will fail her. “I don’t know,” she says, because it’s true. There had been no time to ask her parents how. There had been no time for them to catch up on everything that had happened. But she also knew they didn’t need her to tell them. They’d been watching, keeping an eye on their girls from their place in the afterlife. Their parents had never forgotten their children. They simply never said goodbye.
Maybe that was the part that hurt the most.
“All I know is I can get back. I’m not entirely sure how I know this, or how I’m supposed to do it. But I can. They will be there, and we can see them. We can ask them.” They can ask their parents how.
rhy
the electric lioness of riagan and rayelle
