and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try
now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
It stays with him.
What she’d said.
Because he had loved her so fiercely in that moment that it made his head swim. As if the heart believed that it could love her enough to change her perspective. As if he could love her enough that she might think herself deserving of it.
Silly, certainly, because he could not find the words to say these things out loud. He had merely felt them so strongly that his vision had strobed as they’d laid down to sleep and he kissed her head softly. He had not told her because he had not known how.
But it still echoes in both hemispheres of his brain and in every chamber of his heart the following night when pain grips her. And he wants so desperately for their children to look like her, to be like her so that maybe she will see how beautiful she is, too.
He is mostly silent, trying to stifle his panic, as she struggles. They are young, the both of them, and this is unfamiliar territory. He does not know how to be the partner she deserves, so he clumsily kisses her neck in brief periods of peace before the pain seizes her again. He does not know what to say to soothe or encourage her, just stands and watches, hopes it’s enough that he’s there.
And then their first child emerges. A daughter. Milky white, edged in dark, dark galaxies. And she is so beautiful that it knocks the air clean out of his chest. Leaves him dumb as he shuffles to her side and murmurs sweetly to her. “Hello, little one,” he whispers and presses his mouth to her shoulder. And it makes the same unmistakable sound his mother’s mouth had made when she’d touched him. His heart sinks. Because Desire had wanted it for them, but he had not.
The filly blinks into the darkness, the eyes like marbles, the same milky white as the rest of her. Her pupils like galaxies.
And then their second child emerges. Another daughter. Red. And Thomas reaches out to kiss her, too. And she, too, is glass. And she, too, is so beautiful that he can’t catch his breath. A galaxy spirals in her chest.
He takes a shuffling step backward, affording them space. Watching as Desire seamlessly adapts to motherhood. It makes him ache to watch her delight in the fact that they are like him. Fragile, breakable, vulnerable. But she smiles at him and he cannot help but smile back. Because he loves her and his heart’s all swollen with pride as he sinks closer again. Lowers his head to press a kiss against her cheek, exhales a warm breath into her skin.
“And they’re just like you,” he mutters, “absolutely beautiful.”
He shifts his focus to the fillies then. Their feeble, blinking, heavy-headed daughters.
“What should we name them?”
THOMAS
— and you don't care for me enough to cry —