"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Oblivion- is that where all the wretched things went to? Those ill fated would find their likes there as well and after all this time, it’s fair to count Killdare in that number.
The world had been both cruel and kind to the earthy bay stallion. He had lost and gained, often times twice or more before the prize or guilt had sunk in. Like family, the ones he had tried build, the ones he had lost and the one that was in the end above all- Malis. Wherever she was, wherever their children were he was here and he could not yet reach them. Sure, for a time he had committed atrocities, saw the world though the blood stained tint of glasses his father had fashioned for his mind. Perhaps that is why he had also suffered such equal hardship throughout his years, perhaps. Even now it seemed that he had not truly paid for his sins, the number outweighing the chance of ever paying that debt, but he paid- again and again. One step forward and two steps back, isn’t that how it goes?
Where or why he was is the question, somewhere both here and there and nowhere at all. The cataclysm that befell Beqanna was sudden and unexpected and the results and consequences were of equal measure. Had he known there would have been a chance for this prison he would have tried fight back, to push against the all consuming pressure that built up when the lands imploded, to make an effort for change, for escape. That was not the case, instead he was sucked in, or out, he wasn’t sure. Trapped and unable to make headway at the life he once knew, the life he knew was waiting for him surely. And the others, what would they think? Would they think he would abandon them all so easily? That he would cow in such a way as to leave them all for good, for certainty and without cause or care? No, no those thoughts were not his, yet they were. Whatever this place was pushed down on his soul, tricking his mind and playing games with reality and what was and wasn’t. He could not let it win.
Yet it won anyhow.
It was like being reborn when he finally fell to the earth, or, what was solid beneath him instead of a floating dark expanse of nothingness. Breath filled his lungs as though they had never met the bliss of oxygen, the world was bright, too bright and his glassy-green eyes burned at the sun’s rays. Killdare’s prior thoughts were missing, the internal struggle he had been having just moments before ceased and he stood there cringing in the meadow. Gone were the deepest of his recollections, fine tuned details that he had obtained over the years he had spent in the realm of Beqanna and all those before. Something tugged at him, faces, familiar faces in dark shadows in the corners of his mind. He knew the faces, each curve of their jaws, sharp spindles of black along the bridge of a nose, their eyes both dark and others viciously red. Whispered words from a dark winged man coaxing him into action, the roar of a beast rumbling inside the chest of a woman that never spoke out loud. They haunted his memories somehow, plagued his mind with things he should know with more certainty but he could not summon the deepness of their meanings.
For now he stood, gazing at his reflection in a pool of water as though he viewed a stranger. Scars littered his bay body, a bold clawing against his chest, jagged cuts to the side of his head by his right ear which was now nothing more than a tattered piece of skin.
KILLDARE
spin around to a beautiful oblivion
@[Malis] and any of his friends but im gonna post super slow just be warned xD
She had been without him. And therefore, she had been alone.
(‘Don be too late.’ He was never late.)
He had left while dusk was spinning sugary golds and pinks behind the spires of rock and pine, while she was made to stay put – a princess in a tower. More and more often, Giver seemed to take to roaming, always distant-eyed and thoughtful-like. She could not say it did not hurt her – night after night, bereft of his stars, those which he made for her, like a theater around his skin – but she had been determined not to let him see that. It was better to let him go with a firm but cheery reminder than to hope guilt kept him chained to her like she wished it could, selfish it may be.
But he thought she would be safe. And she thought so too, from the monster a-hunting and everything else besides. A naive notion on everyone’s part.
(‘I’m never late.’)
So he left, tracing his way through the evergreens, taking his thoughts and his stars to a faraway land, and she wandered (humming and reciting favoured old passages from mother’s bedtime stories to herself). Alone. Where it should have been impossible to be so. Where mother was, somewhere. Father. Her younger siblings. They were stunted, she more so than him, because unlike him she still occupied the fable. Where they – princess and keeper – had been incubated together, cheek-to-cheek and tangled. Where they – princess and keeper – were bound by the laws of everything that conception and birth entailed. Eternality.
Where she was a damsel in distress and he was a knight, of stars and watchful eyes.
He was too serious, but that’s why he had her!
And though she loved them all – her entire family – there was something more to Alight and Giver. Something she misunderstood; something he understood only a fraction better. Something patrilineal and rotten to the core.
***
Has it been days since her descent? Or has mere hours past since the land had jerked beneath her, throwing her at a pine tree and then into unconsciousness. Minutes, perhaps, since she woke up, bruised and bleeding (offering only a bewildered ‘oh’ when the tissue had been slow to knit back together, and then had refused altogether).
She cannot tell. She used to tell time by the way their shadows turned around them. Or by the way Giver became antsy because he craved the night. But now it seemed the sun hid behind the clouds of dust and debris had have not settled, made by Her rearrangement and ire. So, she has wandered, without time, sore-throated from having spent every last syllable of their names. Drawing everything from them until she realized, like a stone, they yielded nothing.
When she did not find them – any of them – she fell silent, passing shades of similarly lost and confounded horses. And then, came fear. Giver had always been there, a shield and sword; the veneer of protection, because she had never considered how mortal he was and how little he had for her, in the end. He could armour himself, but he could not afford any of his ancient, celestial energy for her. And somewhere, she knew, there was a monster hunting indigo – she had been milked and weaned on the imagery, and this at least kept from the trees and jumping at every flash of golden skin (finally, it seems, mother words were not wasted).
When she spots the bay stallion by the water she is cautious. Every fiber in her body yells, ‘go to him’, and in most other situations – at any other time – she would have, without thought and like a child, beaming. But she is browbeaten and instead shifts around, head low and ears in motion, to get a look at his face.
Strange and dazed. It is him, though. A knight, by any other colour.
“Father?” she croaks, her heart picking up its pace. She moves towards him, limping but joyous, stumbling and rolling on river stones as it becomes suddenly far too much to pick up her feet. “I would have hoped you would have mother,” tears come, as they have wanted to for minutes or hours or days, she touches his shoulder and it is more than enough.
The shallows eye him right back, turning on him his own questions and giving no answers. Who are you? Who is he? Who am I? Killdare finds this looking glass to be a frustrating one, snorting at the face that stares him down and crashing a heavy, feathered hoof into the shallows. If it had no answers for him then he would allow it to haunt him with faces (even his own) no more. Ripples take the once glass smooth surface and he turns away from the pool, turning his heavy head around, his body following. He was so empty now, with only a thimbleful of knowledge left to his mind and he could not even miss the aspects that were stolen of his memories, he hadn’t enough puzzle pieces to do so.
His heavy thoughts are interrupted, the frown that was pulling so tightly on his blackened lips ceased and replaced itself with a flat line. Father? the question does not really register at first, partially because he had only the one good ear and also because, was he a Father? Two glassy eyes go from glaring at the ground to settling on a face, a young face, golden and feminine in its features. He knows these lines, these eyes that look up at him, but what he knows most is the shock of indigo that drapes itself ever so carefully down her neck. The color tugs as his skull, almost painfully so and there is a tightening in his chest to accompany it- a longing.
A girl, this girl, he knows her somehow. The name escapes him but the face is forever etched in the deepest recesses of his mind, perhaps something even the magic of Beqanna could not touch (or chose not to). She limps, ambling towards him awkwardly and finding uneven footing against the stones that lined the waterways. He could almost feel each step as it slid across the rocky surface, pounding a path towards him at an uneven gait. Should he reach for her, should he catch her? Something feels like he would, should, something presses so hard against the barrier that has built itself within him. A wall he is unable to break down, it’s mortar sealed with a permanence. I would have hoped you’d have Mother?
Mother? Who, why? His eyes searched unknowingly, flitting back and forth across the girl's face, to each eye, her brow, her nose. This child was his, not his, it struggled to make sense of itself. Real and not real were the questions and as she met his shoulder he turned his earthy head to tuck her close. To catch her. “I- I know your face.” he managed, breathing a heavy, hot breath into the child he felt compelled to comfort. “But I don’t know where your Mother is, should I worry?” What an odd thing for a man to seek guidance from a babe, it's hard to say who was comforting who now.
Time had moved quickly in those first few hours, in the chaos of understanding all that had happened – of understanding impossible, improbable things. But Malis knew all about impossible things. It was only when family could not be found, when friends went missing without a trace, when entire homes were found to be demolished, that time finally slowed down.
Against all odds, she had found many. With Nymphetamine’s help she had found what was left of the ruined Chamber, she had found strength in the allies Killdare had chosen to trust – and with those allies she found a home, a new world to protect and keep safe, a world her family could love.
But she did not find her family.
Time lost all meaning in the months that followed, lonely days and even lonelier nights unbroken by any sign of those she dared to love. She had a place on the council, a job, but it was in name only. The only reason she had been placed there was to give those from the Chamber a face to trust, a voice in this merging of so many. But Malis was not meant to lead anything, she was not made for the role Killdare had first entrusted to her. She was certain they would have preferred her bay counterpart, but he never came.
He never came.
Finally, Victra joined them, following at the hip of a small grey mare, and at last Malis found some peace. She had pulled her very pregnant, very reluctant, daughter close and made her promise to stay so that the indigo mare could protect her. Perhaps it was the wild in her eyes, the splinters of a shattered heart poking through her chest, but Victra had not argued. Instead she had stayed and birthed two beautiful girls – and the red on the first was enough to tell Malis who the father might have been.
--
She makes the swim from Tephra, abandoning its inhabitants to the much more capable hands of the rest of those who completed the council. It was not the first time she had disappeared to scour the meadows and forests of Beqanna for her family, and it surely wouldn’t be the last – but it was harder now to leave Victra. Still, she finds she cannot stay, cannot exist without knowing more, without knowing what became of her family.
It had always been her promise to protect them, and she had failed wholly.
When she finds them, the world is undone again. Surely mountains crumble and valleys carve themselves like veins through the forests because she can hear the devastation roaring in her ears. She is blue and fluid, ugly in her agony when she spills across uneven, broken ground to stare at the faces she was certain she would only ever see again in the blessed dark of nightmare. But something is wrong, or changed, because even while he has pulled their girl close, he watches with a deeply knitted brow, with furrows like valleys above his eyes. She is not his by blood, not of his flesh, but she is of Malis and so he has always loved her just as he loves Ivo or Victra. Yet now he is quiet at her side, puzzled, holding her, but it is not the same as it had been before, she is sure of it. Though, so very little is the same, anymore.
She joins them silently, drifting close enough only to touch Alight, to trace love with her nose into the arch of a small, golden neck. She might’ve reached out for him too, reached out despite the shadows she thought she felt peering back out of him through the familiar green of eyes she loved, but she joins them in time to hear the last of what he says to Alight. It is almost nothing, and she almost misses it, but there is no warmth in his question. He doesn’t mention her by name, and after six months of being apart, six treacherous months of not knowing, he asks if he should be worried.
He should.
He should, and he should not have to ask that.
I don’t know where your Mother is, should I worry?”
Dark blossoms in the pit of her stomach, it deepens while she watches them, turning to uncertainty, despair. “Alight.” She says at last, quietly, choking on a name she never thought she would have reason to use again. “Come here, love.” She drifts closer still, touching her mouth possessively to the pale gold of their daughter’s shoulder, coaxing her closer and away from the bay stallion who suddenly felt like a stranger.
But –
She cannot help but notice again how he had pulled her close, how she must have crumbled against him and still, with such confusion etched into his face he held her together. “Killdare?” She asks before she can stop herself, and those emerald eyes flash and flicker like hungry green flame against his quiet face. “You should,” she says again, moving around Alight to stand closer, “you should have worried.” When she reaches out to him now it is against every instinct in her body, it feels like betraying herself, and yet when her mouth finds the curve of his jaw, when it drops lower to find that spot of soft above the hollow of his mouth, she is stilled. With a frown she pulls away again, stark and blue and wild in the uncertainty that tears through her now.
It never occurs to her to ask him where he has been.
Not right away.
Time has been rearranged and those minutes, or hours – maybe days – of separated wandering (as if in some ashen world, apart and lit dimly by wild hopes, or nothing at all) had stretched into an oblivion. Had reached into forever and sampled something dark and scary. So she lets him take her in. He smells of such sweet, comfortable familiarity (his own hair, and it reminds her of pine even if the long months had scraped it roughly from his coat) that she cannot be mad. She cannot be hurt or worried.
Besides, she is painfully self-absorbed. Has always been, though never maliciously. In a sort of childlike way that is never charming, but sometimes tolerated. But if it is not herself that occupies her mind, it has always been them – mother, father, Giver, Victra, Ivo, Roque, Milia. Them and their tales, like storybooks bound in same-flesh. Princess and princes; damsels and knights; Kings and Queens. She presses her nose into his shoulder and she does not know that he is not hers, nor is she his – it would have mattered little, in any case.
Because she needs him.
She needs him too badly right now.
When he speaks, it does not register.
Not right way.
It tickles something in her mind, and her brow, perhaps, creases a bit. Somehow she is willing to see past it – or is willing herself to – because she has not tumbled and marched and worried this long and hard only to find him so absent. She cannot. He cannot. And she can see, perhaps, why he might be in a daze. A passing kind of symptom of the malady they were all shaking off. “What do you mean?” she smiles, even giggles a bit, staying hugged into him, “of course you do, silly.” It could almost not matter. In the moment, she simply needs him, but in a few more – in an hour or a day – she'll need much more than just that. It is when he sighs, heavy and muddled, that she lifts her nose from him and looks up into his eyes and sees such nothing stare back.
Confusion.
Struggle.
There is no recognition, but the hazy want to know (again). As if he fingers the rich blue hair, curls it between his fingers and divines in the colour, looking for her name and the names of others like her. She feels the gentle touch on her neck and she turns her bright eyes towards it, responds to it with such knowing yield. It had rocked her and warmed her, sometimes chastised her. She opens her mouth to speak her love, but the moment is hitched. ‘But I don’t know where your Mother is, should I worry?’ She blinks fat tears from her eyes and sniffs, looking back to father, searching for some understanding. For some way in which his words can make sense, be made to be right and okay. “Wha–,”
She yields, again, so easily and because she wants to (so, so badly) be away from him. Because she loves him so, but he scares her like this – she wants to withdrawal and hide until it is better, so she can redo this whole thing. (She would say ‘father!’, he would say ‘Alight!’, and they would find mother together. And then all, come together in a pack, would find Giver.) With a remote kind of gawk she drifts against her mother’s blue body, and is home. And suddenly his absence is illuminated, an extension of the suffering. It had been so long. She had danced and tittered on, with and without Giver, and the enormity of it had never sunk in.
It does now, because he is not back.
Not quite yet.
“Mother?” it is a quiet, almost rhetorical, appeal, like a toddler behind her skirt and appealing to her, ‘what is wrong?’
Hope is the thing with feathers. No, no it isn't. Hope, it breeds eternal misery. Somehow, some way the world kept circling in on him, a broken record, a vicious cycle. Yet as he holds the girl he feels better, if only a little. Maybe it’s because he thinks that he is making her feel better, that he is providing comfort to this lost little child with the familiar face. She calls him Father and it has still yet to truly sink in. His mind races, eyes flicking over the ground back and forth, searching. Was he her Father, is that why he knew her face in such detail? Is it?
It’s not enough to dig now, it's like shoveling water. No matter how hard or deep he goes there is no progress, there is no great epiphany at the end. So instead he cradles her, asks things of her that no man should ask. She doesn’t resist him either, even if he makes no sense, even if what he says unsettles her she doesn't seem to care or doesn’t show it. Instead she laughs, a warm sound even accompanied by the fat tears in her eyes as she looks up at him. His own don’t want to meet hers, are almost afraid of the emptiness they must display back because he is lost, so very lost.
And then the world flips, topples over on top of him.
That face, he thinks, those horns. He knows them, knows the deepest color of the night after the sun has set. The color of a bruise after it has set in over days from a strike long since forgotten. Every so slowly she approaches and for Killdare time has stopped, the world has gone and there is nothing in the Meadow now but them. If only he had more than that, more than the shape of her face, the lines of her lips and the curve of obsidian down her nose. But he has something, even if he doesn’t know the name, even if he doesn’t know why.
His eyes do not leave her, can not tear themselves away from the deepest emerald that make up her own. Even as she says his name he is still, a long stream of air leaving his lungs. How long had he been holding his breath?
Then she scolds him, beckons the girl away from him and her departure from his side leaves him cold. He is still even as she touches him, presses her mouth against the softest place of his face and it feels like fire. It feels like she ignites a flame against his skin and he breathes deep, reveling in her scent, something he knows as well as her face. Mother, this is the Mother the girl sought after. Father she had called him and so he is able to put two and two together but the unknown that still stands between him shatters his heart. He wants to know, he wants to remember but the wall resists, fortifying itself so he cannot break through. “I- I know your face too,” he claims as she pulls away and the child looks to the woman with questions in her voice, though she speaks none.
The emptiness he feels when they are both absent from his touch is transparent in the longing that sets itself in his glassy eyes. “Are you mine?” he asks, willing it to be so. “Am I yours?” he swallows after this, gulping down air as if his chest were entirely too empty.
When Alight drifts close enough to touch, it is everything Malis has ached for, every jagged piece in her chest soothed. She pulls her daughter close, touches her nose to the curve of a delicate cheek, traces a dozen circles etched in gold, a dozen dapples gleaming against that perfect neck. “Alight.” She says again, a breathless sound, a whisper sound. When she shifts again it is to pull the palomino even closer than before, greedy and selfish and broken from so much time of not knowing. The worst had filled her nightmares, had leaked into the quiet thoughts of wakefulness, she had come to know it intimately in recent days. But it is like holding her now breaks a dam in her chest and it is all she can do to hold back the wild and ragged, the black and bleak sorrow that thickens like sludge in her veins.
“My girl,” she says again, draping her neck over those thin gold withers and pulling her close against her chest, “my Alight.” For a long moment, she is quiet. Only her mouth moves, grooming strands of stray indigo in Alight’s dark mane and smoothing them back into place against the contrast of gold. When her eyes drift back to Killdare, back to the large bay stallion standing beside them, they are uncharacteristically soft – though, she has rarely felt a need to hide any part of herself from him. Her brow furrows and the sadness deepens, the uncertainty too, at the strange way he watched them. “Alight,” she says and her voice is gentle but cautious, her chin tightening protectively against the palomino, “have you seen Giver?”
It feels unfair to ask, unfair because they have always been inseparable and yet he is not here. But she has to ask, she must know, because even though he is not of Malis, he has always belonged to the strange blue mare. She may not have any right to feel his absence like a weight in her chest, but she does, and it feels no different than the weight left by Ivo, Roque, and Milia’s absences.
Her eyes lift from the gold to return to the rich bay of a face she knew, and yet no longer understands. His eyes are still green, still bright and aching and carved from the same emeralds as hers, but they are different when they watch her, when they trace the horn on her face and the deep blue of skin like a bruise. They watch each other in the same way, exploring the face of a stranger, of someone they know in the deepest of ways - and yet somehow there are pieces missing.
“You should know my face.” She answers him quietly after a moment, the words shadowed by the furrowing of a dark brow. He should know more, she thinks, he should know everything. He should not look at her like he does not know her, he should not because it breaks something, everything, in her chest. His second question stills her and those dark green eyes hood themselves. Reflexively, defensively, she nearly lies to him. It feels like an opportunity to sever these bonds between them, to set him free and let him be loved by someone with less dark and wild in their heart. But when his eyes change, when he watches his family with a hunger that she feels matched in her belly, she knows only greed, only the way she needs him.
“I will always be yours.” She tells him, her eyes lit like green fire against his face as she watches him from over Alight’s back. “From the moment you found me in the meadow, I have been yours.” The intensity of his gaze is nearly enough to push hers away, but she remains, leaning heavily against Alight for the comfort it brings her now. “I cannot answer your second question, though.” She pauses and this time her eyes do drift from him to hide the hurt that spiderwebs across her face. “That will be for you to decide.”
09-15-2016, 04:28 PM (This post was last modified: 09-15-2016, 04:31 PM by Alight.)
This would have been too much for her, had it not been for the pain she had followed, herself, to get here. The falls and scrapes, bloodying her knees and lathering the curves of her body; dust sticking to sweat in the creases of her chest. She had never been so dirty, so travel-worn. Alight is not yet hardened (such the opposite is true – she has been shorn naked, bent low and alone for the first time in her life), but has tasted the first bitter sips of hardship. Hardship. Something both mother and father know so well; Alight, however, knows not even the enormity of her own blissful ignorance – so savagely guarded.
(It would rend her into a million pieces, of course, to know the full-throated truth.
...to know all the things that revolve around her like false stars.)
Alight is not a strong creature.
She is a flawed one, perhaps fatally so. Her flesh bearing the intimations of some original sin – a crooked back and bones against bones; something prying and hungry resting in the pit of her gut, though hungry for what, it is unclear.
But somehow, though bleary-eyed and weak against her mother (together they stay standing, if it can be believed; shored up, blue and gold) Alight does not hide her eyes or wander away in search of prettier things. Even if it becomes too much for her chest to hold, there is nothing beyond this. Desolation has laid waste. All around them games of lost and found play like the knell of bells or the wail of end-times, names loosed from lips to chase ghosts through their deserved hinterlands. She is afraid to join them, again, so she nestles in close.
She watches her father, soothed like a babe by her mother’s cooing and fussing. She lets her weight sink, and when needed, bears the load herself.
(Short years ago, this would have been romantic. Something played out in dusk between her and Giver, read as if from a floral script; acted like a theater.) When her mother inquires about her, Alight shakes her head (and her body follows, trembling with stuttered inhales), “no.” But they both know it is not as simple as this one word. It is a desperate, hurtful ‘no’. “I looked.” So, so hard. Down that mountain’s unfriendly sides. Through the brambles the land had laid for her, like traps. She had followed hope like a wisp around deserted copses of newly planted trees. Hope, in abundant supply, because she had to.
Of course she had. (Had he? Once shaken loose from his tumble through space... had he?
Silly question. He must have – they are same-hearted, one-minded, single-fleshed.
Giver must be returned to her.)
That was on the horizon, looming heavy like the glare of an oncoming sun. She would have to scour again, comb everything until she had him back in their welcomed chains, side-by-side.
Her mother’s answers are calming ones. It is a gripping, icy thing to see her father plead with truth. ‘I will always be yours,’ is like a balm, because it is what Alight has always assumed to be so. Enduring and unshakable, these are the foundational things upon which her life is built (but for today, never lending a thought to the insidious nature of love; the unsure way her fortress leans-to). She chooses to say nothing, but smiles at her father her nose snaking towards him to breathing warmth into the gap, impelling the pieces to fall together.
Of course, that puzzle is scattered, so irrecoverable. The Chamber is gone – no soldier-stiff pines to jog his memory. Where is Victra? Ivo? Milia? Roque? Giver. (Were those faces obliterated, too? The ones even more his than she?) Is there enough left? A heavy weight sinks into her belly, "you are all of ours," she murmurs, frowning, as suddenly it seems an impossible task to mend a lifetime.
His absence has an impact far larger than he had anticipated, he’d not even known he’d been missed. Hell, he doesn't even know how long he's been gone but it feels like a lifetime through their eyes. Each facet of emerald set against rich indigo bleeds pain, love, uncertainty. A myriad of emotions and he can not tell which is true nor which is warranted by this chance gathering. The wind coils his tangled locks around his neck, splaying stray strands of curled ebony to tickle at the two women gathered.
Then she stabs him and he doesn’t even know why the blade is so sharp.My girl, my alight Mine, mine, mine. Hers, only hers. Once he would have angered at such possession, snorted and tossed his head at the audacity with which she snatched the girl away. If he were the owner of his past he would have flared his nostrils at this, had he not raised the girl as his own? Been there for each dawn and dusk, tended to scrapes and bumps? He’d loved her like his own flesh and blood and still she was herded from him like he was the monster that helped form her. Oh, if only he’d know this, if only he remembered.
Still, the pain seeps through his veins, tightens around his heart and he can not hide the glare that leaps to his eyes for one fleeting moment.
Giver she says and silvered gold washes into shape against his memory. His weight shifts as he regards them, both curled into each other and he wishes to snake himself between them but he can’t. He doesn’t. You should know my face, she chides and two earthy ears splay out flat on top of his head. He feels like a child, new to the world, with eyes unseeing and mind empty and without lesson. Frustration is the word that tumbles to the forefront and he huffs, searching the ground for answers that won’t likely scrawl themselves in the dirt. She’s his, is she? The scent of barnyard and musk filtering through his nose and yet there is nothing to allow such a smell to be present. There hasn’t been such a stench for some time in these parts yet it finds him anyways, another thing to taunt him.
You’re all of ours, the young one relents and hot air releases into the chill of winter. Are they sure they had the right man? “How can you be sure?” he wonders and he hasn’t meant to say it out loud, raising his head to look the woman in the eye but she’s turned away from him. “How do you know me so well when I don’t even know who I am?” And it hurts, burns each time he tries to coax the truth from behind closed doors, he winces shaking his head side to side. “Can I come with you then, while I try to know? Is there room for me where you stay?” Is there room, as if he’s far too big a burden to make space for. Can I, may I, as if he must ask permission to follow. Killdare had rarely ever asked permission in his life, he was so different now...
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