10-11-2021, 05:21 PM
She is quiet for long enough that the strangeness of this day has him wondering suddenly if this isn’t all part of some wild fever dream. If she is little more than an apparition summoned from this ache inside his chest, this loneliness that has devolved into something more like distance - a distance he enforces if only because he knows what becomes of those who dare to love him. Like his sister, his twin. It would make sense that his mind, broken by sickness, by death, would pick this girl to tether the last pieces of itself to. Cheri, that stubborn fledgling healer who found him in the dark and owned him from the moment she had first scowled a warning at the laughing manticore while he watched her give pieces of herself to a broken little sparrow.
He had thought about asking her to stay then, stay with him in the dark, stay in Tephra by the light of the volcanic streams that stretched like unwalkable paths across an overgrown jungle. But she had been a girl, she had been naive and innocent in a way he had been unwilling to tarnish, and from the moment she stopped watching him out of the corner of her eye - the moment she had stopped believing he was some kind of monster, he knew she couldn’t stay. Couldn’t be around him.
He would ruin her.
Now here she is, curled against his side and looking him over with such unapology that it is all he can do not to take her, to claim what could never be his, even when she speaks such quiet, impossible words and touches her nose to his. Stay with me. His doubt is a snarl in his chest, a fury in his eyes because she should know better than to trust someone like him, to want someone like him. He is a slave to this need, to needing her, and so it has to be Cheri that keeps distance between them. Has to be Cheri that keeps herself safe.
But they are each prey in the other’s web, each victim to this thing that lives inside both of their chests and drives them together with a kind of gravity that leaves him feeling -
Everything.
Crushed beneath the weight, buried but somehow weightless. Like there is purpose again, meaning in a life that had begun to unravel at every single seam until the colors of his future were indistinct piles of meaningless thread.
And hope.
It is something strange and unfamiliar, and it feels like stone inside the cage of his ribs, like a parasite sitting inside his chest waiting to devour him. Because that is all hope is ever good for. To wound, to disappoint, to break. There is no world where someone like him gets to make a life with someone like Cheri, no matter what claims she makes of what things could be. He will only ever disappoint her, only ever make the wrong choices. He shouldn’t even be allowing himself to picture any part of this future she hints at, these could-be’s. But he does because he cannot help it, because he is untethered and unbound and she is reaching for him in the dark despite every single reason she has not to.
So he imagines, in these quiet moments, what it would be like to live inside her world of could-be. To trace kisses over this delicate body pressed beside him, to learn all of the dark spots strewn through the white like they are stars to guide by, constellations that will always bring him home. He imagines lying together like this every night, talking about whatever wonderful adventure she had that day because he is absolutely sure she fills every moment with something important. He isn’t sure what he could possibly be good for, especially in a place like Loess, but maybe he will have stories to tell her as well. Things to make her scowl, things to make her smile.
He even imagines what she would look like with her belly swollen with his child, and the pain of that ache inside him is what finally breaks his silence and brings him back to her. “I would have come even if you hadn’t asked.” He says, and his lips are in the strands of her mane, a caress over the arch of that beautiful neck. “I let you leave me once, Cheri. I will not be doing that again.” He wonders if she is clever enough to hear the threat in these words - he doesn’t mean them to be, but even he can hear the way it sounds. The darkness in such a vow. If he were a weaker man he would wish that there weren’t so much darkness in him, that he would have inherited more of his mothers goodness, her gentleness. But he knows better than to wish on daydreams, on lost causes.
He wants to touch her, to learn in this moment every single one of these unknown corners she speaks of, but he can feel the curse waking inside his skin like a living virus tracing fissures through flesh as though he had been sewn together and suddenly is not. “It is nearly night, healer.” He whispers against the crook of her ear, beside that crown of crystal against her brow. “I don’t want you to stay and see this.” He says, and his lips brush her forehead with a kind of tenderness even he had forgotten himself capable of. Inch by inch he leaves a trail of half kisses down the line of her dark face, pausing only at the corner of her mouth before a quiet, feline smile slips across his lips. “The change is gruesome. There’s no need for you to watch me die twice in one day, hmm?” He presses the last kiss to her mouth, to lips as soft as the night is dark, and there is nothing halfway about the way he demands more. The way he has forgotten that he does not want to take her innocence. “Go on, little love, I will come find you later in Loess.”
He had thought about asking her to stay then, stay with him in the dark, stay in Tephra by the light of the volcanic streams that stretched like unwalkable paths across an overgrown jungle. But she had been a girl, she had been naive and innocent in a way he had been unwilling to tarnish, and from the moment she stopped watching him out of the corner of her eye - the moment she had stopped believing he was some kind of monster, he knew she couldn’t stay. Couldn’t be around him.
He would ruin her.
Now here she is, curled against his side and looking him over with such unapology that it is all he can do not to take her, to claim what could never be his, even when she speaks such quiet, impossible words and touches her nose to his. Stay with me. His doubt is a snarl in his chest, a fury in his eyes because she should know better than to trust someone like him, to want someone like him. He is a slave to this need, to needing her, and so it has to be Cheri that keeps distance between them. Has to be Cheri that keeps herself safe.
But they are each prey in the other’s web, each victim to this thing that lives inside both of their chests and drives them together with a kind of gravity that leaves him feeling -
Everything.
Crushed beneath the weight, buried but somehow weightless. Like there is purpose again, meaning in a life that had begun to unravel at every single seam until the colors of his future were indistinct piles of meaningless thread.
And hope.
It is something strange and unfamiliar, and it feels like stone inside the cage of his ribs, like a parasite sitting inside his chest waiting to devour him. Because that is all hope is ever good for. To wound, to disappoint, to break. There is no world where someone like him gets to make a life with someone like Cheri, no matter what claims she makes of what things could be. He will only ever disappoint her, only ever make the wrong choices. He shouldn’t even be allowing himself to picture any part of this future she hints at, these could-be’s. But he does because he cannot help it, because he is untethered and unbound and she is reaching for him in the dark despite every single reason she has not to.
So he imagines, in these quiet moments, what it would be like to live inside her world of could-be. To trace kisses over this delicate body pressed beside him, to learn all of the dark spots strewn through the white like they are stars to guide by, constellations that will always bring him home. He imagines lying together like this every night, talking about whatever wonderful adventure she had that day because he is absolutely sure she fills every moment with something important. He isn’t sure what he could possibly be good for, especially in a place like Loess, but maybe he will have stories to tell her as well. Things to make her scowl, things to make her smile.
He even imagines what she would look like with her belly swollen with his child, and the pain of that ache inside him is what finally breaks his silence and brings him back to her. “I would have come even if you hadn’t asked.” He says, and his lips are in the strands of her mane, a caress over the arch of that beautiful neck. “I let you leave me once, Cheri. I will not be doing that again.” He wonders if she is clever enough to hear the threat in these words - he doesn’t mean them to be, but even he can hear the way it sounds. The darkness in such a vow. If he were a weaker man he would wish that there weren’t so much darkness in him, that he would have inherited more of his mothers goodness, her gentleness. But he knows better than to wish on daydreams, on lost causes.
He wants to touch her, to learn in this moment every single one of these unknown corners she speaks of, but he can feel the curse waking inside his skin like a living virus tracing fissures through flesh as though he had been sewn together and suddenly is not. “It is nearly night, healer.” He whispers against the crook of her ear, beside that crown of crystal against her brow. “I don’t want you to stay and see this.” He says, and his lips brush her forehead with a kind of tenderness even he had forgotten himself capable of. Inch by inch he leaves a trail of half kisses down the line of her dark face, pausing only at the corner of her mouth before a quiet, feline smile slips across his lips. “The change is gruesome. There’s no need for you to watch me die twice in one day, hmm?” He presses the last kiss to her mouth, to lips as soft as the night is dark, and there is nothing halfway about the way he demands more. The way he has forgotten that he does not want to take her innocence. “Go on, little love, I will come find you later in Loess.”
sorren
i'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat
@Cheri