you pour the water —
Would Baptiste feel sorrow if she understood the magnitude of that which she kept from her sister?
Would she feel guilt for hiding away the shadows? For only showing her the faux sun?
Perhaps, but she doesn’t know better, young as she is. She doesn’t recognize that a lie by omission is still a lie in the end, no matter the source. She just knows that she needs to protect her sister from what she is and what she is not. She needs to pretend that she is as soft as her mother, as kind as her sister. She needs to pretend that she does not long for anything else, does not ache for what lives in the shadows.
It is so easy to pretend.
It is almost easy enough to fool herself.
But she does not, in the end. It lives constantly in the echoes and she feels herself pulling at the threads of it absentmindedly as they talk, picking at a wound they will not heal. “To stone,” she confirms with a gentle smile, her eyes going distant as she thinks back to her time spent with the young boy. She wants to tell her sister that she thinks she could. That it would be easier if she had some reason to avoid the sun instead of just feeling like it was not made for her, but instead she nods. “I don’t think I could either.”
(A lie, a lie, a lie.)
“What is a firebird?” she questions before laughing, the sound a genuine one. “Is it exactly what it sounds like?” Because what a silly question to ask otherwise.
— I would haul the stones
@Iliana