“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”

Michael cannot remember the last time he went to the ocean.

(He does. There had been rocks against his ankles that had turned to dandelion seeds which drowned in the water. There had been endless grief and limitless hope and a queen and her dragon and he had said will you come home? and she had.

They had gone home to a deeper grief, to the city on fire. And it had not been the first or last time that Michael had run from Denocte when it needed him most. He remembers with the clarity of a hawk in the hunt.

But his guilt is the only thing louder than his fear - and so he does not remember, if he can help it.)

He comes to the ocean now as a child, small and lost, tugging at her coatsleeves. If the sea turns her face on him, he thinks, maybe she will give him the answers. Maybe she will rise up from her prodigious basin and take him by the hand, ring her church bells and declare his path as she takes his hand and leads him toward it.

If only it were that easy. He is ankle-deep in the incoming tide, wet sand stuck to the dirty white of his feathers, numbed by the tooth-shattering chill of the late winter sea. He is thinking nothing, just the blissful black void of a mind that has turned a blind eye to itself until it is dizzy from going in circles. The sea does not rise up from the sand and she does not lay his shaking hands in hers and Michael is blue-lipped and suffocating, wordlessly begging for--something.

He closes his eyes, tight enough that their corners crease, and turns to go. The thick white curtain of his mane follows him through the surf toward land, where it drips and drips and drips until the scarf around his neck is soaked through and his shoulders hurt from shivering. It is somehow still better than anything else.

This is when he sees her. Its like looking in a mirror: the dull gold of her coat in gray winter light, the sharp blue of her eyes. It makes him feel strange in some distant way, like waking up from a bad dream. He smiles like the sun in the dead of winter, bleak and grim.

"I know that look," he grins mirthlessly. It is either a curse or a compulsion, whatever drives Michael to speak when he sees her. He has not quite decided which. "What are you thinking of?"

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”

Perhaps it is wrong, to say too much.

Perhaps there is some deep-set and subtle sin in opening yourself, in ripping your seems and letting out all the moths. Catharsis is not the justification Michael believes in when he opens his mouth and pours himself into everyone else's empty spaces as if he is not also just a house of rooms that echo each word he says until he is dizzy from hearing it.

Michael does not say this--as Michael does not say most things, whether they should be left unsaid or not. Instead he watches her, blue on baby blue, as she turns from him to the sea, gray-green and rolling in the heavy winter light.

Something settles in him that he doesn't like, something like the remnants of a nightmare, the way it sits in the gut for hours after waking. Michael does not know what it is, just that it rises in his chest like the sun when she mentions her family.

What he doesn't realize is that it is a kind of mourning - and a thing that's lived for centuries can be forgiven for forgetting how to love a thing that can die in any way that touches him - but the ferocity with which it hits him makes it hard to breathe.

"That must be hard," he says, swallowing around the rock in his throat. Grief fills him and then passes through and out of him as if it were never there at all. He thanks the sea, silently. He thanks Elena, silently, when she changes the subject.

You look cold, she says, and Michael gives her this smile that is so much warmer than he has ever felt, just a gentle tucking in of the corner of his mouth. It looks out of place around the tangled, dripping mess of his mane. "Don't worry, I am very cold." He says. "I'm just--"

Michael pauses, and his smile outlives itself, rotting as it shines.
Why is he here?

Because he is afraid? Because he has never been so afraid or so lost in his hundreds of years of life? Because he is full of some indefinite, cringing sadness that he cannot place or name or even necessarily see, but it is so heavy that it is always right there where he feels it the most? Because he cannot quite see who he is through the fog?

There are many reasons.
What are you doing out here? he echoes back to himself. Michael looks out at the waves and he thinks, drowning.

"Just visiting," he decides, "haven't been in a while. My name is Michael."

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”

She reminds him of Eleven.

The thought hits him like an arrow, running him through before he can draw his own. It's there in the worried crease of her brow, in the light cast off the wet sand that lands at an angle on the curve of her jaw and the arch of her ribs. 

He aches this as she nods, creaking like old ships. Elena's face is set in some indefinite, effortless patience with an undercurrent of defiance. It is a look he knows well. It is a look he has dreamed all his life, long as it is--and to see it again feels both holy and empty in a way he cannot bring himself to consider, let alone speak.

He breathes: in, then out. The feeling passes through him like sand. It is an ache a few lifetimes removed. It slips through his fingers like broken glass. Michael doesn't look at his hands, bleeding and bleeding and bleeding.

She turns back to him, teasing, and Michael ducks his head.
"You really shouldn't," he tries, offering her a grim smile. "worry, I mean. I think I'm tougher than I look."

When he looks up his face is buried in the wet, white mess of his mane but he meets her eyes from beneath it. Michael is not surprised to see her full of motherly affection, the kind of open-armed desperation that he seems to invite everywhere he goes. He thinks it is the beautiful droop of his eyes or the dull gold of his coat but it never is.

It is the same look Isra turns on him when he smiles like he is looking at her from across the yawning jaws of a canyon. It is the same look that Moira has never turned on him, not once--and maybe this is why Moira's face settles in him, now, with the quiet reminder that you are leaving her.

Elena is trying. She is trying so hard. He appreciates the gesture, vain as it is.
She says, tell me something about you that I don't know. It should strike him as odd--it's the kind of question he would ask someone. They are perfect strangers. He shivers against her side, and laughs, like apple cider and all bright, warm things.

His head breaks the surface. He bobs. Fine.
Everything is fine.

"So, what?" he chuckles. "Everything? Do you have that kind of time?"

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”

I wouldn't doubt it, she says, and Michael wonders-- should she? When he claims to be strong, to be steady, to be anything at all but a coward buried up to his neck in the soil of his fear and his grief and his guilt, does it matter? Should she believe Michael? Michael who lies, Michael who hopes, Michael who closes his mouth and smiles around unspoken things that cut his gums like glass?

Should anyone believe him?

Elena looks at him and in him, digging and peeling and picking and Michael knows what it is to look at himself, the curious, dull shine of his own eyes when he takes hold of a person and pulls and pulls and pulls until he can hold each reel of film up to the light and see their faces change, frame by frame. He thinks he doesn't much like it. He says none of this, as usual.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he offers. He is shoving back thoughts as he speaks, some far-off memory of blood in the sand an an old woman's eyes when she said I don't know where your father is the way a vulture might have, and Eleven, always Eleven, who had touched her shoulder on his and promised death could not touch him in any way that counts.

And now he is here, Novus, and he is also trying not to think that death has found him, finally, spun the long, long story of his life to a few more short chapters, and how, from time to time, he feels its teeth on his ankles when he closes his eyes.

He doesn't much know if he likes Elena. She opens herself and Michael cracks in turn, shedding shell after shell that he had forgotten he had. This must be how Toro had felt.

He reminds himself to apologize and then forgets the thought altogether.

Elena teases, the soft cream of her face creased with a smile, and says to him: I can go first, if you'd like. Michael takes a step back to see her better and bows his head in invitation. He does not need to say, be my guest, it is there in the tilt of his head, the wet blue of his scarf as it slaps his neck, the small smirk that grows and grows until he is smiling in a way that looks so right on his face it is a wonder it happens so rarely.

"I'm sorry for that, too," he says, "I have--had? a granddaughter that is--was blind. But I last saw her centuries ago, so..." and he shrugs, like it never mattered, like it is a life so far-removed from him that it isn't real, just another film strip rimmed in black, burning away in the fire.

Michael gives her no time to respond, instead tucks his chin to his chest in thought before saying, "I'm afraid of snakes. And most lizards." His smile thins. "I don't like how still they can be."

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”

There are always people, asking him--begging him--to stay or to go.
Eleven asks him to stay. Asks him to flay himself open and show her all the parts of him that hurt, each raw and aching wound. She asks him to stay even when she does not. She asks and she asks and she asks until Michael is sand, falling in wet clumps out of her hand, breaks apart as he plummets.

Inwe asks him to leave, because he had had tried to be a good king instead of a good father and in the end he was neither, with nothing to show for it - so here he is, king of nothing. Father of no one. Another name washed away by the surf.

Isra asks him to stay, and he can't. Isra asks him to stay with her heart black as a burned out tree and a hungry god inside of her--or she is the hungry god, but he can't tell. Isra asks him to stay and Michael's heart fills with helium, beats faster and faster until it is a pair of wings carrying him away. He is so tired of running but he runs and he runs and he runs.

Isra then asks him to leave, with her, with her family, to do-- something. And Michael says yes, yes, anything for you, yes, because he could never say no. Not again. Not after the last time. And he is so tired of running.

“They say a serpent tricked Eve into biting the apple and in doing so doomed us all," Elena says, "and that is why we fear them," Elena says. For a second Michael just stares at her, trying to find something to say. He does not know how to say that he fears anything that hides so it can't be seen. He does not know how to say that the snake is not there until it is rattling and flashing its fangs. He does not know how to tell her that his life has been snake after snake, curled up in the sun, waiting and waiting until he gets too close.
at he doesn't look, and that's why he gets bitten. He doesn't want to look. He'd never want to look.

Michael follows her eyes back out to the sea, tracking a wave as it crests and then rolls in to meet them. It grabs at his ankles and the wet sheet of his smane and says tell her but he either can't, or won't, so he doesn't.

"I think it's a lot to ask, to belong anywhere." he begins, watching a crab scurry out of the surf to bury itself under a rock. "I think some places want you, and some don't, but I don't know that a person ever belongs." Michael wonders when he became so cynical. Michael wonders many things about him self and none of them are good.

Would you go?
Elena asks him to go, asks him where, asks him eh, and Michael thinks of the journey ahead with a heart heavy enough to think their ship. He thinks of the sea, and the sky, and gulls keening into the setting sun.

He thinks of Elena, and her eyes that beg, and her heart so big and so wide it could swallow him whole.
"Yes." he says. "But not alone."