There is something different to the markets. Maybe it's the way Morrighan walks down the cobblestone street with tired eyes. She is usually more aware of the crowds and looking for meddling kids to yell at. She'll glance at the merchants, maybe browse a couple tables, then leave. She'll notice how some couples are close together, speaking in suspicious, hushed tones.
But not today. Today she is distracted by her thoughts and a growing hole in her heart. Her mind is a tangled mess of emotions she can't begin to sort through. She may have a crush on a girl she barely knows. Isra is leaving. (And, worth adding, Moira is still around).
Maybe she is afraid. She's never been great with change, especially big changes, or really anything involving emotion. Unless it's anger, she's pretty good at mastering that alongside her fire. This isn't exactly something she can solve by burning though, even if it is satisfying.
The Warden finds herself at the bar, which for her, is an odd place to be unless she's patrolling. Today it's a personal visit and even the bartender is surprised. She orders something a lot harder than what she normally goes for. Maybe it'll untangle the mess of her thoughts. Maybe it won't.
There is a familiar mass of hair in the corner of her eye and she turns to see the palomino sitting a few spaces down. Morrighan snorts and walks over to him, her expression neutral.
"Hey," she says in an almost awkward but somewhat confrontational way. Her mind is too muddled to have prepared a proper start to the conversation. "You still owe me a story you know." Maybe a bar is just the right setting for a storyteller and someone who just wants to keep her mind off the inevitable. A story could be a good distraction. To their right is a stone fireplace and Morr can't help but eye the flames flickering behind the grate. They seem to grow brighter after a few moments.
“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.”
He is leaving.
There had been a time Isra asked him to stay, wished with her whole vengeful heart that Michael would lay down and sleep beneath her star-freckled sky, lay his bones in the dirt of her city like a bed or a grave, turned to gold. Now she asks him to go, to cross her oceans and wage her wars simply because she had said will you come? and Michael would hurl himself into the sea, cast himself into the heat of the sun, walk until his flesh became paper and his bones had worn down to dust--if only she asked it of him.
Does he want to go? When Michael thinks of fire, of birds reborn from the ashes, of the clatter of hoves on the market streets and words said under the din of a crowd, he starts to think, I don't know. The thin but definite line between yes and no becomes fuzzy and hard to see, much less read. Something in him is a bird when it hears the name Moira - the sort of bird that flees when a name is not church bells or divine suffering, the sort of bird that looks at a smooth thing, one that cannot break the skin, and thinks, this will be the death of me.
In the end, he is no closer to the answer, so Michael goes to the city with his heart in the back of his mouth and chases it down with a drink that makes him grimace as it claws its way down his throat.
---
The warden finds Michael just as a waitress plunks another glass down before him, squinting when she smiles. He doesn't hear or see her approach -- the only sound that registers is the alternating pounding and keening of his heart; the only thing he sees is the light from the fireplace as it dances in the curve of his glass (and the empty one next to it.)
Hey, she says, as if it is so easy to do so: just open your mouth, let something out, say it because something--anything--needs to be said. It is almost a particular comfort to look up and see Morrighan, frowning down at him, backlit by the flame until she slides into place. It's strange how Denocte has grown on him when few things can. It is strange that what floods him is not panic but what feels like relief, as cool and soft as the rain.
He almost laughs. He worries if he does it might sound like he feels: tense and mirthless.
You still owe me a story, she adds, and he nods. Michael does still owe her a story. He raises his glass to his lips and smiles against the rim.
"Hello to you too," he purrs before drinking, one long pull that pushes his lips together as it goes down. She is looking at the fireplace opposite them, close, and he is studying her like his favorite book. The hearth calls to her, begging to grow and to grow and to grow until it has eaten the bar and all her indecision whole. When he finds something in the set of her mouth that reminds him of his, Michael looks away. There is a bird in him, beating its wings.
Michael asks, "I must stress again how incredibly subpar I am at storytelling -- according to the queen, at least." He says this and the world beats for a moment, like it stutters under the weight of the word. "Maybe you should have a few, before that. For your sake." He cannot quite remember if it's honesty or self-deprecation. He wonders if it matters, really.
Exchanging hellos is almost strange for her given what she's known for. Making friends is never on her agenda, yet here she is with Michael, about to sit down and have drinks with him. Since she became Warden, she's been out more and getting to know those within the Court. Maybe it's for her own sake in some way. She still only tolerates the company of a very select group of people. The rest she'd rather throw her fire at until they leave her alone. Some don't go away that easily either.
Lucky for Michael, he's made the tolerable list, even if he might never know about it.
He is modest about his storytelling and it makes Morrighan laugh. She takes a sip of her own drink and it warms her throat as it goes down. It's like liquid fire and she stares at her cup a moment. This stuff could be dangerous for her.
"I'm starting to think you're no storyteller at all and you're just bluffing," she says with the slightest smirk. After he stated his place in the court as such, he seems to skirt around having to actually show his talents. If Isra truly thinks the way he says, maybe there's a reason he avoids it after all.
She takes a sip of her drink again when he suggests she should. It really is stronger than anything she's had before and will probably be the only one she orders. She's only ever lost herself once and that hadn't been when she was drunk. Last thing she needs is to black out and realize she's burned the whole Court down once she finally comes to.
"Or is the only story you know the one about how you're bad at stories? That would be a shame," she snorts, her sarcasm coming to light as usual. Maybe the man will wow her, maybe he won't. It's not like she has much else to do now anyway besides wallow in her thoughts of love and turmoil.
“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 sips, and Michael can hear her chains rattle, the rumbling of coals deep down. She glows where Michael is cold, damp wood and the things that crawl along the ocean's floor. For a moment he looks at her and wonders what it's like to be both fire and ice. He wonders what it's like to be molten rock inside so much dry, yellow clay. He wonders what it's like to be anything at all.
She sips, and Michael feels himself breaking open in some way he doesn't expect, cracked like her clay, spilling and spilling until he has become his own sea. He is drowning. The water fills his lungs, he sinks like a rock, and--
--and, Michael picks up his own drink, downs a mouthful, and then uses it to scoot his empty mug closer to the edge of the table, where the light on its rim reminds him of a night at the end of autumn and the hum of the people sounds more familiar than his own heartbeat.
Her voice pulls him to shore. He looks up at her and his heart is gasping. He smiles like it's nothing, smiles with his tongue caught between his teeth and his lower lip, smiles and smiles and smiles.
"While I do a fair bit of bluffing, and while I'd argue that storytelling is mostly bluffing in the first place--" Michael closess his mouth, purses his lips, and draws a breath that is so shallow and quiet it may have never been drawn at all.
"The thing about stories is time, I think. There's nothing interesting about time. It passes. It passes and passes and passes and--what? I don't think in straight enough lines for most stories."
What brings them here, to this bar at the edge of the market, cluttered with strangers and strong drinks and distant music? Whatever it is, it rolled in on the winds of a time he's forgotten, settled in his ribcage and the pit of her heavy, waiting eyes--eyes that judge, eyes that almost laugh, almost sigh. It winds in and out of Michael's veins before it crawls up his throat and clean out of his mouth when he asks, as he's watching her, "Tell me what you want to hear a story about, then. Try me." like it's a dare.
He doesn't know who he's daring. Him? Her? Them? He smiles. He smiles and smiles and smiles.
All while Michael is talking, Morrighan just stares. It's a look of unamusement (which is really her typical expression anyways) with a brow raised. He's just going on and on, almost as if on purpose so he doesn't actually get to a story. Is he afraid? A pathological liar who's claimed this whole time to be a storyteller? Is he just screwing with her? She takes another sip of her drink.
He says he doesn't think in straight enough lines for stories and this makes her laugh. "Clearly," she snorts. "This whole time you've just been going in circles." It could be the booze also.
At the least, it's the booze making her feel warm and less guarded. It's like the fog in her mind has dissipated and slowly, slowly, the fiery rage is too. Although every once and a while, she can see the flickering of the fireplace in the corner of her eye, its callings to her are more muffled. Maybe this is why some become drunks- they can forget for a little, even if it's losing a part of themselves for the time being.
Then to her surprise, Michael dares her to try him. Shouldn't she be daring him? Apparently the tables have turned and she's taken aback for a moment. What did she want to hear a story about? When she asked him, there was never really a topic she had in mind, she just wanted to hear how shitty of a story it was.
"Tell me a love story," Morrighan blurts out, slightly slurred. Apparently the first thing to come to mind for "shitty stories" is a love story.
“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's right.
Michael is afraid. Of everything.
(A time on the mountain, with the wind barely shifting the wet mass of his mane, with a scarf that glitters like the scales of sea serpents, like the tolling of church bells. Michael's hands shake as he unfolds the paper. Michael's voice shakes as Isra reads. He shakes and shakes and shakes and doesn't stop until he reaches the tavern's doors.)
Michael smiles and smiles and smiles like he is not made of eggshells, like her mismatched eyes do not fracture his skin as they pass. She takes another impatient drink, and Michael smiles. She speaks, and Michael smiles.
Morrighan looks again at the pit of dying fire, at its red coals and the almost-white ash tucked beneath them. Michael things it would be nice to be called to like that, thinks that if one person, in all his life, had thought to call him to action, to dare him to live and to grow and to become he may have said no, I am not going. He thinks if anything at all were different he would also be different--just enough to be a little less scared, a little less sad.
A little more like her. Or Isra. Young gods with their hearts on a pike.
He reaches for his drink and finds it empty. He tries not to hear Isra and her magic screaming at him to wake up with closed mouths and dead eyes. He doesn't want to wake up. He never wanted to wake up.
"Alright then, a love story." he repeats, snagging the edge of his smile the rusted nail of his fear, feeling it unravel thread by thread.
Michael rolls the empty glass in his grip, glad that its weight holds him down.
He breathes: in, out.
"There is man on the edge of something-- a cliff, or a porch, or his wits, it doesn't matter. The cliff and the porch and the deck all tell the same story, all say something sad about the man, because the porch is bare and creaky, the wits are frayed, and the cliff is a cliff.
The man is painting. His wife hates when he paints, especially her-- her husband is not one for flattery, always says things like 'there's beauty in truth' or 'why would I lie about why I love you?' and this last one usually make the wife shut her mouth, and huff, and storm back to the house with her fists balled at her sides.
When he is finished he packs up his easel and brushes and carts his work home, leaning through the door with a smile on his face.
'Look!' he says, smiling, and turns it toward her.
She examines the canvas, its thick brush strokes, its just-dried layers of paint. Before her stands a mirror of sorts: she can see the tired lines of her face, each carefully-rendered and out of place hair, the scar on her cheek from a life she can barely remember, white against the dark brown of her skin.
'This is an insult.' she says, her voice breaking. 'I can't believe this.'
The man rests his chin on her head and says, 'Your face is wrinkled from smiling, or frowning, or just being. It is not easy to be anything at all. It is not even easy to be alive. Your hair is a hard day's work--because god only knows you are more capable than I am. Your scars mark each time you looked pain in the face and said 'instead, I will live' and you have lived. I am glad every day you wake and I can wake with you. Age means only that you are strong enough to still be alive.'
She smiles.
Someday soon he will paint on his cliff or his porch or there at the end of his wits and she will think how he only paints her, in her cracked old beauty. And he will remind her again, that she is strong enough to stay alive."
Michael blinks, watching Morrighan with an expression that starts as curiosity and quickly spirals into something like broad panic before setting his glass on the table with a loud thunk and laughing.
"Um--" he stammers, "I'm going to get another drink. So. Do you...?" but he doesn't finish his thought or wait for hers, just ducks into the crowd with a nervous smile.
The man seems… nervous. He's taking so many sips of his drink and looking around before actually speaking. Is he trying to find the story in the air or at the bottom of his glass? Somehow, Morrighan is not so sure that that's how it works.
When he does finally speak, it sounds like he's stalling a bit longer before he starts. He goes into the story of a man who paints his wife and it's mostly cheesy. In fact, that's exactly what it is. Maybe she didn't know what to expect when she asked for a love story.
She continues to listen. The way he describes everything isn't that bad, but it seems to be a very short story. Then when he's done, it's like he forgot where he had been this whole time and lost his mind. He stammers and starts to ask a question before running out of the bar without looking back.
For a moment Morrighan just stares and blinks slowly. Maybe it's the booze keeping her calm.
She looks back down at her drink that has one sip left and gulps it down.
"What an idiot," is all she says before setting her empty glass down and heading back home.
There is something different to the markets. Maybe it's the way Morrighan walks down the cobblestone street with tired eyes. She is usually more aware of the crowds and looking for meddling kids to yell at. She'll glance at the merchants, maybe browse a couple tables, then leave. She'll notice how some couples are close together, speaking in suspicious, hushed tones.
