come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
She dives into the ocean like it will wash away this pain inside her chest, and it roils in greeting as though the water had missed the shape of her. As though it had been expecting her. At first she does not realize where it is her thoughts have led her, that the volcanic shore she had stood on led only to one place and that this place is a jagged piece of stone inside her chest that has never let her stop bleeding. But as soon as the dark ocean tide carries her far enough to make out the distant shores of Ischia, she knows. She knows from the way her heart leaps and breaks like waves thrown against a wall of dark stone. She knows because the salt on her face is tears instead of ocean water, and she can taste this sorrow on her tongue.
This place might have become home if not for whoever had stolen that night from her and Dovev - because it hadn’t been just memories taken. It had been a version of a life she would never know, a love she had never deserved but found anyway.
This is more than love, isn’t it.
The memory is like a knife thrown at her chest, his voice as clear in her mind now as it had ever been. She can even remember the way it had felt when he bent to kiss her neck and the words had whispered across her skin like a promise.
I love you, Luster.
The urge to sink quietly beneath the waves is almost more than she can bear to ignore. Maybe there is bliss in the dark silence below. Maybe this pain won’t find her in the next life.
I’m going to make damn sure you never fucking forget it.
She falters, and in an instant she is beneath the waves and in a place so dark that not even the sun can reach. It might be startling if this weren’t already a familiar kind of hell.
It would be so easy to sink, she thinks, so easy to stop fighting these hands wrapped so tight around her neck. But there is more than just her now, there is life inside her belly and it grows stubbornly every day as though it does not realize that she is a wasteland. There is nothing good that could possibly come from this, and yet she cannot smother that tiny flicker of hope that kernels like a seed inside her chest. This feeling of love rekindled inside a chest made of stone and built like a fortress. Did she even know how to be a mother still? Could she do this again?
She is swimming again, and she doesn’t remember when it was she made the effort not to drown, but she knows she must have because there are stars overhead and shore beneath her feet and she is looking out at a world aglow with the bioluminesce she had once found so beautiful. It just reminds her of him now, of the celestial blue marking he’d had at the corner of his mouth. The same markings she now has beneath each eye like carved blue trails of shining sorrow.
She swallows and blinks, feels dead inside and yet somehow wild. Like she is coming apart and coming undone and there is no one to help hold her together. Fenris would have, she thinks, which is why she cannot be with him, why she is drowning herself in a night-dark ocean just to put this distance between them. To keep him safe from the storm inside her chest. From the way she has ruined everything that has ever had the chance to mean something to her. She will protect him in this way that no one ever protected her.
The way is a familiar path beneath her feet, though it is overgrown and well-forgotten in a way that makes her glad. This place should belong to no one. She finds the small river that feeds inland from the ocean, finds the place where he had rinsed the wounds his bone armor left behind. The same place she had been brave enough to finally leave a kiss on that marking at the corner of his mouth. Her eyes stay riveted there for a moment, forced flat and empty because she already knows what it is that lingers in the dark a few feet away. Can already feel the way its presence wounds her.
But she lifts her gaze anyway, tracing the greenery that hangs in flowering vines over the mouth of a cave that had witnessed every moment of their togetherness. Home, or at least it might have been. She steps inside and closes her eyes against the way the vines whisper over her back and swollen sides. Would he be furious to know she came here in foal to someone else? Yes, likely. It’s good then, that he’s gone.
But the memory of him is like a ghost at her side, and if she were to close her eyes she knows that whatever this new magic is living inside her would take her back to that place, that time again. It’s why she’s here at all, why these memories are being dredged up from the muck of her past. And it’s so tempting to let go, so tempting to give in, so tempting to be anyone other than this broken husk.
Her pain is a fury that explodes from her, it is lightning in the sky outside, lightning crackling along the stone walls of the cave she stands inside. She screams, and though the sound is at first fury it fades to something that is so much more like agony. Like falling apart and coming undone. “I don’t want this.” She says, or maybe she’s yelling, but the thunder outside matches the racing of the heart booming inside her chest. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.” It isn't until she notices the way her stars have filled every dark nook and crevice in this shallow chamber that the storm eases at all. The lightning lessens, though the thunder still matches the beat inside her chest, and rain falls in earnest like the tears on her face.
even though i try not to
@[Beyza]
