come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
There is a knot inside her chest where her heart used to be. A tangle of dark roots that twist and bend and bury beneath it the beating of that thing she had once believed in. She had been someone soft and delicate, someone quick to smile and laugh, even quicker to love. She had been made of light and dark, of stars and the empty spaces between them. She hadn’t realized that this beating thing inside her chest was something made more fragile than glass, more brittle than bones eroded by great lengths of time. Hadn’t realized she’d been made so utterly wrong.
The harmony of twilight beneath her skin had started to fail, and where once the light and dark had coexisted in tangles of dusk and dawn and all the in between places, an imbalance grew. The dark thrived and it festered, it stained the light until it withered inside her, until the clashes beneath her skin left her feeling raw and ragged and entirely unrecognizable. In its lack, something new grew. Something that fed off the wild violence of the pain inside her chest, the highs and the lows and the constant state of chaos that always left her running for someplace new. To find something that felt like home and belonging and all the things that had been taken from her. First by a nameless magician, then again by her own sister.
Most days it feels like the ground must have opened up beneath her. That she is falling forever with nothing to catch her, nothing to hold onto.
She thinks that must be why the twilight inside her skin turned feral. Why the sound of that thing beating inside her chest is the echo of thunder, of the storms raging inside her heart. If there is still light inside her, it is only in the violent flashes and crackles of silver-gold that spill like static along the arch of her spine and down those slender legs. Only in those silent stars like pinpricks of cold silver light that drift around her in a tiny galaxy - always close enough to be indisputably hers, but never near enough for her to touch.
She can feel him, this man of fog and mystery, can sense a sameness in him that had been strong enough to coax her closer. To pull at her curiosity instead of her pain. But now that she is close enough to see that shade of desperation in the night of his eyes, she wonders if it isn’t pain after all that draws her near enough to watch quietly as a boy reaches out to touch his chest and make a promise he has no right to.
She drifts closer without ever making the conscious decision to do so, taking steps as silent as the fog that drifts behind him, more ghost than predator. There is something hidden beneath that beautiful roil of gray that calls to her, something same and unknowable, something that has her nearly reaching out to touch her mouth to the glistening frost on his neck. She refrains, but the lightning dancing across her skin does not. It leaps through the space between them, finding home against the gray of his body and over every curve and angle until it climbs down his legs and disappears into the ground beneath him. She watches, and she does not understand that she had willed it to touch what she would not. Instead she wonders once more at their likeness.
“Do you want to be real?” She asks him after a moment, and her voice is the sound of wind promising rain to the trees it passes. A whisper-hush of spectral promises. Then, to the boy whose face she can only look upon for a moment before his youngness reminds her of her own children. Of Drakon and Lanterna who she knows she will fail at some point - if not now or already, then certainly soon. She is made too entirely of all these broken pieces. Too sharp and too brittle. The wind rises to a howl, tearing leaves off of branches that bend so low some of them break. It howls and it shreds and it is identical to the yawning horror that howls inside the emptiness of her own chest. “You’re too young to be meeting ghosts.”
even though i try not to
@[kensley]
@[Benjamen]