[P] but so our path is laid

[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.”

The feeling had never quite left him--a rock in his chest that he tries to force down, but it sits, and it sits, and it rots, and it rots. Michael had watched the waves, sometimes dark (far darker than he remembered) and sometimes the same blue as his eyes, or teal capped in webs of foam. Sometimes he had walked the deck and listened to the wooden tap of his hooves and watched Isra and her family and asked himself why. Sometimes he had slept. But mostly Michael had looked at the sea.

Sometimes Isra looks at him and he hurts. Sometimes he looks at Isra and he wonders why. But mostly he looks at the sea.

---

It is just after dawn and Denocte purrs in her streets like a sleeping cat. Overhead the sky is a dark purple smeared into midnight blue flecked with white like the seafoam, white like the mess of his mane, white like the pockets in him that are opened and blank and bleeding light from every crack. It is the cold light of winter, he thinks. It doesn't match the calm warmth of the first breaths of summer that meet him. It is no place for the chirping of crickets or the croaking of frogs.

Michael comes in the arms of a ship raised up from the belly of their court. Michael comes with his scarf wet and heavy around his neck. Michael comes in this post-dawn lull so that nobody sees him, so they do not look at the mast and the sails and the masthead and think that their young god has come home.

It is too early for that. Too dreadfully early. And when he thinks this he knows that he means both for her, and for him.

The ship is docked, the lines are tied, and Michael drops a coin or two in each pocket without a word. No one looks after him as he passes and he does not tell them the rock is still there, still heavy, but now sticky with a thick film of shame that he cannot touch, or look at, or even consider.

The only thing he says, as he climbs the hill to the city and shoulders his way through the heavy wood gates (the guards do not ask, either, because they see Michael, see his thousand yard stare, and push the doors open as soundlessly as he pours himself through), is when he reaches the door to the castle, hung in its lanterns and creeping ivy, and he whispers to the guard "Let me speak to Moira."

The guard takes Michael through the main hall and their steps ring like an old church. Michael tries not to think of the things that are gone or the things that are there because he cannot think of anything but the rock in his stomach and guard's back, bobbing in his periphery.

He is left at the kitchen door. The light is low, a single torch on the wall to offset the orange glow from beneath the door. Michael nods, smiles thankfully, and opens the door before him.

The room opens up and eats him whole. Baskets of fruit, pots full of spice and dormant stoves leer in from all corners. And in the middle of it, red like the torchlight, red like the blood sprinting into his cheeks-- there she is.

Now that Michael is here, he doesn't quite know what to say.

@Moira

[Moira]

i swallowed the sun and it burned my tongue and it burned my throat but it couldn't burn away your memory

She is a moon eclipsed by sorrow and emotion, a great chasm yawning, looming, jowls hung open to swallow her. For a month or two or three, the Emissary disappeared - out into the wilds, out without a trace. Even Neerja, her most beloved companion, had not been there to keep her safe, keep her fed. In that time, it is said strange lights flickered in the woods and in the desert sands further north. During those months, it is said strange, animal, sad screams and raging howls were heard at night - only at night - from something shredded by a thousand lives worth of grief.

When the woman came back, her eyes were sunken and hollow and she was skinnier than the day she'd first arrived. Moira hadn't spoken more than necessary - to Antiope stiffly, to Neerja haltingly, to the startled guards quietly - and avoided so many for weeks on end. She'd become a ghost, stealing into the kitchens at night only to take enough scraps of food for the next day, avoiding the many bakeries and shops she'd once so frequently visited.

Even Bexley had disappeared while she'd been gone.

Everyone seemed to disappear.

Then, Antiope had come, full of anger and full of Denoctian pride - its regent, its Queen, its ruler as Isra - her dear, dear Isra, her sister-kin, her heart's other half - and put her in her place again. She'd been awful, a failure, neglecting everything and everyone, neglecting herself until not even she recognized herself. Neerja had near given up on the woman when she was not sleeping, choosing instead to curl against her in the night, keeping her shivering form from freezing over entirely.

Her room held marks of a war, marks of her night terrors howling and raging; bursts of light as shields and spears and bullets etched into the stone walls, leaving glowing traces for days and then dying at last as her heart had over and over. Neerja never really cried, but she mourned the loss of the heart her cub once held.

Now, whenever she reaches for the Pegasus, she finds only a cold and screaming wind racing over a winter plane.

Tonight is a bad night, one where the Tonnerre girl cannot sleep and cannot find comfort in the confines of the library. She feels shredded and raw and hollow, she feels disappointment in her bones and a great well of nothing where something should be.

Just after she's reached the kitchens, a single lantern full of her star-bright light flickering in the middle - silver instead of yellow, white instead of orange - there are footsteps outside. Briefly, soft as the fall of a cat's paw on autumn leaves, her heart stutter-steps and she freezes. Nothing moves, no muscles, not her eyes nor her chest nor her heart. There's a sorry excuse of a slice of bread hanging mid-air, a meager amount of honey-water tucked into a cup, and her silence to greet him.

Doors are shouldered open, silent from a fresh coat of oil that still burns her nose. She always applies it when she comes, and the ladies in the kitchen always know when she's been there because of it. Sometimes they try to leave her things, those nights, Moira never shows her face. Now, there's a golden ghost with soul-blue eyes and moonlight hair staring at her, as haunted on the surface as she feels on the inside, and she can't find the words to spit out, can't stop the choking noise in the back of her throat.

If her tears still came as they once flowed so easily, she is sure she would be a mess upon his shoulder, breathing him in to assure herself this wasn't some dream again and again and again. But they don't, and she doesn't move. Moira only stands there, pouring another mug of water and offering it to him.

She does not intend to stay.

She does not want to feel anything tonight.

"Speaking." @Michael 

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[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 looks at him.

It's so much like falling. It's so much like dying. Michael is so familiar with fear but it never gets easier to breathe, or to move, or to take the dark mug that she hands him. For a bit he can't breathe, until his lungs sting and his stomach hurts and his ribs feel like knives when he finally exhales.

Moira has lost weight. Moira has lost everything. And if Michael looked her dead in the eyes and her ghosts asked him why? he would not have the answer. He would not want the answer. He knows that whatever he'll find in the pits of him, whatever will be there when the rock in his stomach cracks open, he isn't going to want to call it by name.

It is so much like falling. It's like stepping off the ledge when he steps forward to close the space between them. It's like feeling his feet leave the ground when he sets the mug on the counter so she doesn't see how it shakes when he holds it. 

She says nothing and he says nothing and the Earth is laid out like a map beneath him and it is coming, coming, at an alarming speed. He is full of cold air and fear. He can feel his legs moving but they're kicking at empty space, fighting to live when the choice has already been made. And always there is the Earth, rushing to meet him.

Michael looks at her, more bone than he remembers, not the same vibrant red and orange and black. That strand of hair that is never in place looks flatter and it is only then that he realizes he's close enough to see it at all.

He wants to say, I came back for you. He wants to say, I would have stayed for you. He wants to say, if only you had asked me. He wants to say, If only I had given you the chance. But he says nothing, as Michael always does, when things need to be said.

Michaele looks at her, bone and dark fire and the light from her lantern, and he breaks all his bones on the map of the earth. It's fine. He deserves it. His voice breaks when he says "I'm--" and then tries again, "Please stay."

@Moira

[Moira]

i swallowed the sun and it burned my tongue and it burned my throat but it couldn't burn away your memory

They are both hollow like the whisper that longs to slip past her lips almost as fiercely as she is determined to stay silent. Every word she wants to say, wanted to say, is shattered against bark and starlight in the shadows of great mountains and strange beasts. She'd yelled until she couldn't. She'd cried until that, too, was lost. She'd lain there until there was nothing more to do between dying and returning.

So she'd returned.

Then he walks in like a ghost, like a man defeated. His skin is sunk like hers, but there is muscle where she has only depressions and once-smoothed curves. Time unwinds around them like pulling thread from a spool, no tangles, no hiccups, just a continual turning like the turning in her head that has her dizzy, has her reeling, has her rocking and shaking and wondering somewhere deep, deep down where it is dark and it is quiet and it is lonely. He takes the dark glass and sets it down, letting it rattle on the countertop for but a moment before it stills, vibrations gone from the surface.

Moira hopes she's that calm, that cool, like a reflecting pool staring back at him with all the ghosts of the past and future and present in her eyes.

When his ribs crack under the strain of breathing and his heart cracks under the pain of beating, when his voice croaks out like the sweetest music she's heard in ages - sweeter than the song in her chest that keeps clawing at her heart, that Neerja keeps pushing and pushing and pushing in so that she won't stop moving, stop living, stop being - the phoenix cannot meet his eyes. Why? Why does it hurt to look at him even though every cell is on fire and reaching for him. Every piece of her straining to close those few inches - he's covered the distance, he's come back.

So is she refusing herself?

There are cracks in the crenellation hardened and re-hardened and broken again that are new and shining. They sing to her like he does, they remind her of her time Away. Of the forest and the wood and the moon-song that made her drunk and made her weak. She knows why she holds back, they are the shadows she cannot look at like she cannot meet his eyes.

Instead, her cup is discarded on some vacant surface next to a saucer still full of sweets and treats meant to be a gift, an offering, a prayer for the girl who looks like fire and feels like ice. There is no voice in her throat to rise, there is nothing but the taste of his skin when she crashes into him like the sea and buries her nose in his hair. Even the moon and tides couldn't pull her off him if they tried. There she stands, her breathing ragged and thin, her eyes closed more tightly than a clam shell.

She breathes him in and he smells of salt and blood and the sea. She breathes him in and there is Isra on his skin from weeks ago where he has not bathed in more than the ocean. She breathes him in and bares her teeth and bites his shoulder like a child when a tear slips out. "You should have, too," she whispers at last - hoarse and sore and cracked more than before. Even now, her words are but ash and midnight smoke.

"Speaking." @Michael 

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[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.”

If he were not broken bones and bruised lungs he might have laughed, not like someone would laugh at a joke but like someone would laugh at a sad movie, the way someone would feel a balloon in their chest that rises and rises until it's coming out. A laugh that's much more like a sob. If he were not anything at all like he is he might have dropped down to his knees and begged her to leave him like he left her.

But Michael is selfish, and hungry, and drunk when she touches him. He wants the way his soul takes root in his body. He wants the way the cold and the dead of him warms like it's been baked in the sun. He wants this, and this, and this over and over until he forgets why he left at all, or how it felt like he had to, or how he--terrible, selfish Michael--had not given her the chance to say no.

Because he looks at her and he knows, he knows he would not have gone at all.
At least he hopes.

He wants to be wholesome. He wants to be lovely. He wants to be worthy of the way she tucks herself under his chin and slots herself into the dip here his neck meets the slope of his shoulders. He thinks that he is sad, and so terribly scared, and that his guilt is this big, heavy rock that grows and grows when her teeth touch his shoulder and Michael has to hold his breath.

She is stronger than this. She is stronger than him. He just wants her to see that but Michael is not full of her light and all he casts is shadows. 

He is torn between wanting her to leave, to run, fast and far, and the heavy thing in him that wants her to stay. Like he should have, like she says. 

He should have.
"I should have."

Michael had expected her to hate him, and hoped that she wouldn't. He wonders why every time the tide pulls him away and then washes him back, he is never met with hatred. Somehow that makes it worse. He thinks he may be full of hatred, himself. Moira is tucked into the curve of his neck and Michael angles his jaw to lay his cheek flat behind her ears. His heart is beating fast in his chest and he feels like he is burning and drowning at once but the only thing louder than his heart is his guilt.

"Have you slept?" he asks, barely loud enough to hear. In the dark of the kitchen it is quiet. So quiet he can hear himself breathe. "Do you need to?"

@Moira

[Moira]

i swallowed the sun and it burned my tongue and it burned my throat but it couldn't burn away your memory

Silence permeates her ears, her eyes, her consciousness. There is her and there is Michael and there is an ugly roaring and flooding and cracking of more ice statues she's forgotten about already. There is the soft, furious beating of her heart and of his, and then there is his whisper to fill the void, to bring the starlight flaring a little brighter behind them. It is the only sign that she is aware, the only glimpse of how deeply he affects her when her power pulses through her veins, through the starlit lamp and through the room.

Paler orbs come to circle him, to dance and play like little spirits, and then they settle upon his brow as a radiant crown so beautiful and terrible.

She bites her lip to hold back more tears she hopes were dried the many moons he was gone. She bites her tongue to keep from lashing out and pushing another one away. Caine's face flashes in her mind, the way she'd offered for him to kill her, the way he'd told her he couldn't and she was just being stupid. Moira is more stupid now than then, she thinks, and it is a thought as soft as a butterfly's wings, accepted and nesting inside with the rest of her sorrows and woes.

It is idiotic and infuriating to still feel when she'd rather be numb, but she knows to be numb would be to become a thing she never wanted. Moira loves her family, but she does not cling to the Tonnerre ways as once she would have to please them. They're rotting and terrible and pull one apart if they cannot stand up to the pressures that would weigh down their shoulders and soul.

No.

She will not be numb.

She will not be stupid.

"I feel like everything is a dream, or maybe some terrible nightmare." she says, removing her teeth from his skin, looking at the indent she made there. Her face is as dry as the crumbs on the counter now, her eyes as bright as the star she's captured for herself and herself alone.

Moira enjoys the way his chin tucks behind her ear too much, the warmth of his breaths a melody on the crest of her neck, letting her know she's not alone. But the phoenix is always alone these days. "Was it worth it?" she asks, no hint of scorn or shame or anger. Where she should be full of passion, brimming with untapped feelings just waiting to be found, there is a void.

Like the dark between the stars, like the crumbling centers of wood caught by fire, there is nothing. And still, she cannot bring herself to pull away, to let go of this dream just yet. Just as she couldn't let herself let go of him after the tavern, after the trip into the forest where she'd put a crystal in her hair and a reminder of what the world could be.

For a moment, she is full of shame for what she has not done. For a moment, she wants to disappear. For a moment, she wants to fulfill that dream of making a brighter future for the children.

Perhaps, in time, the Emissary will leave and do that, too.

Perhaps.

"Speaking." @Michael 

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[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 holds on like Michael might hold on to something, like Michael is holding on: the white-knuckled grip of a beast suspended above a void, with nothing but claws and grit to keep it from falling. Michael sometimes looks up at his own hands--sweaty palms, bruised fingers, calloused and bloody and blue from the cold--and wonders why he's so scared to let go. Sometimes Michael looks down, at the pit beneath, yawning like so many wide mouths, as hungry as it is patient and as patient as it is deep. When he looks down, Michael knows.

Fear. It is fear that keeps him alive. It is fear that keeps him from living. And so the wheel of entropy turns.

Between words he can hear the guard changing shifts down the hall. Moira's light gathers in Michael's hair and makes a sad painting of them. Where the smooth stone walls had been the blue-gray of dawn, only just brushed by fingertips of her lantern, now it gathers like fog in the slope of the vaulted ceiling, glows orange and yellow and white against the sharp corners of each counter stacked with baskets of fruit. Michael smiles at her.

Michael thinks he could never do anything else. He wonders why, but he doesn't wonder quite long enough to find the answer. He is glad, still, that she cannot see his face, smoothed in a smile far too kind for the things he has done, the man he has been--specifically toward her.

Her life feels like a dream, or a nightmare. Michael does not pretend it is not partly his fault. Michael does not stop the breath he holds until it hurts his head, or how he sighs like an old king when he lets it go.

"I'm so sorry." he says, because if he whispers his voice will break and it will fall to the ground with the rest of the things he is to cowardly to say. "I'm so, so, goddamn sorry." He is. He is so sorry he wishes he could fling himself into the sun and burn away like so many dead stars. He is so sorry he can't quite remember who or what he is.

It takes everything he has--the foundation of Michael shakes with the effort--but he lets her go, and steps back, and cool, dark air rushes in to take his place. In her light the thick sheet of his mane obscures his eyes, which fall under its cutting shadow, but his mouth is screwed into some expression between grim, bleak hopelessness and a frankly untoward amount of affection.

"No." he answers. "It absolutely wasn't."
He wonders if she knows. Because Isra had called him away, and he had followed. Isra had asked 'will you come, will you stay?' and Michael had nodded like clanging church bells. He had gone for Isra, away from everything. But he knows, now, when he can see himself wreathed in a crown of light in her eye's reflection-- he had come back for her.

If only it were that easy.

@Moira

[Moira]

i swallowed the sun and it burned my tongue and it burned my throat but it couldn't burn away your memory

His chest does not rise and it does not fall, and for a second Moira thinks time stands still. After another moment when she takes a breath, she realizes that Michael has stopped breathing as though it would make it so that he stopped existing. But he could never stop existing, even if she were to have made him up in some terrible dream, even if she were in a coma and he was just a doctor trying to break through into her subconsciousness, even if he was never real at all.

To her, Michael will always be real and there and present and wonderful.

Even when he's gone.

At last, warmth brushes her neck again on a sigh that is older than the winds and more painful than falling from the cliffside over and over, her wings failing to open, her eyes never quite closing to what awaits at the bottom. It is accompanied by the soft timbre of his voice, not a whisper, something more solid like a stone, something to settle in the pit of her stomach that lurches and roils.

Part of her is glad, that selfish, cruel part that is still completely Tonnerre and completely childish and trying all too hard to hide her vulnerabilities is all too pleased like a cat playing with a mouse. It disgusts her when that part reaches out, but it fills the void, even for a moment. And she thinks it good that he missed her so much that his bones ached and the very blood in his body boiled in protest. She thinks it good that it hurt him to be away, too, and wonders where her pain went in the mountains. Did the sea winds bring it all the way to him, every scrap and ounce that she screamed and yelled and clawed and cried out? Did he feel every breaking piece of her like a blow to the heart?

None of it is said. Silence is her companion again, and she wonders how it would be if she held to it like a vow, like she did for so many weeks while he was away. Would he beg her for a word? Would he turn away?

Every reaction of his has her reeling, but nothing could prepare her for his confession, for his admission.

It wasn't worth it, this pain, these feelings or lack thereof. It wasn't worth it to leave their city, their home, and abandon everyone who loved them. "You can't change it now," she says instead, mourning the absence left on her skin where his had covered so completely.

She sees herself in his eyes, in the dark crescents of them under a shaded fringe of moonlight hair. The girl that stares back is stony, is too somber and serious. The light that wreaths him flees from her, even as it drips from every pore of her body, begging to be shaped. Sunlight starts to filter in, softly, sweetly, like he'd once spoken to her so gently, and even that calls to the Weaver girl like some exotic beast. Hold us, shape us, change us, take us it is a chorus of voices echoing around the room. Higher than his, more of a feeling than words, more of a pulling that demands attention.

So she pulls foggy strands to braid into her hair, pulling it from bun after bun, distracting herself just so that she won't fall back into a pile that is Michael and a pile that is warm and a pile that is golden and endless and beautiful. She pulls her hair from her face, draws back bangs with a band of gold. How she shines, how she's cast in such shadows !

Beautiful and destroyed all at once.

"She's not coming back, is she?" Moira asks, knowing that he'll know whom Moira means. She has to change the subject, she can't dwell. Keep moving, come back to me, Neerja had once told her that the only way to continue is to keep moving forward even if it hurts. Well the phoenix has never been good at living in anything but the past, letting it drown her in wave after crashing wave of sorrow and misery, and she's always been even better at running away and avoiding the fight, the problems, the aching altogether. Once, she'd messed that up. She won't again. She can't.

"Speaking." @Michael 

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[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 looks up at him: round eyes, weighed by bags. The notch of her brow is more pronounced than he remembers, the cut of her cheek is sharper. He looks at this and feels himself smiling like someone might smile at a funeral-- and isn't it kind of mourning, to stand here with her and to know that it was all for nothing. Hasn't he been mourning himself since the day he was born?

There is nothing to do but stand, and search for a word more than 'sorry,' a word more than 'please' and 'I know' and 'Caligo help me I'm cracking in half and I'm going to die.' Moira pulls a few handfuls of his mane, brushing out knots and weaving light in their place. Michael thinks only that his hair smells like saltwater and old wood, which is fitting, because he isn't much more than a sunken ship, covered head to toe in black barnacles and urchins, groaning away on the seafloor.

Or, at least, that's what it feels like.

She's not coming back, is she? Moira asks, and Michael has to find his way out of the fog of his thoughts to answer. He looks at her, at her sharp edges, her delicate frown, her bottomless patience for men who don't deserve the time of day, and he tells her the truth: "Of course she is."

He doesn't know who she'll be when she returns. He doesn't know if he'll look at her and see Isra, the unicorn, or Isra, the young god, or Isra, an old god, full of too much power to be anything but. He doesn't know if he'll look at her at all. He doesn't know if he can, after-- well, this.

Michael says none of these things. Instead he watches her halo, and the spears of light it casts around the room.  In the window's reflection there is just Michael: and a ball of white and gold-- but he sees her, he thinks. More than he should.

"You know, you're beautiful." he says--there's that smile again, something placid and sad, something far too warm for a room full of sadness. Suddenly he can't help himself. It occurs to him that he's very, very tired. "--and you should probably go back to bed."

@Moira
BRING ON THE DRAMA BABEY

[Moira]

i swallowed the sun and it burned my tongue and it burned my throat but it couldn't burn away your memory

His grin is as barbaric as it is tragic and beautiful, remorseful in a way that only Michael knows how to wear so well. Still it makes her sad. There is a pit in her stomach, and it does not scream but it roars, it is a crumbling echelon, a slow destruction and hollowing until all that will be left in her bones is light with no trace of the once-girl left. Maybe, just maybe, she's as much a sinking ship as Michael, but she refuses to acknowledge that, to accept it. Days will pass and she will go on.

Moira is immortal.

Moira is eternal.

Moira is.

And that leaves time for so much sadness that is so alike and unlike the sadness that the man in gold and scarves wears. Two faces of the same coin.

Again he surfaces from some great fog, gone from her again and again. What thoughts, what horrors, the phoenix wonders, must keep him awake and so far away? Are they like the nightmares that plagued her for so many years, that still, when the days are especially terrible, come back and make her writhe and scream and wake up in a cold sweat with tears on her face? Or is it something else, someone else, somewhere else, that still calls to him as a siren, demanding his attention, unwilling to release him from their hold?

Golden eyes squeeze closed, her heart throbs for a sister she believes to be gone, gone, gone forever from her. Like Estelle. Like the twins. Like Eluoan. Like Marquelle. Like so, so, so many faces. Still, there is a broken smile on her lips, it makes them crack as she does, and phantom hands reach up as dark lips do, brushing softly against his cheeks, his ear. Then, "How do you lie so easily?" she asks as ash on the wind.

As she pulls away, he watches her as one might a far-off ship that holds their lover. Or perhaps it is the sea that he loves so much that he cannot bear to come back to her for too long. Doubt is a beast and its hunger is endless. Sent as a plague upon her mind, her confidences, her trust, where its black paws land, joy withers into despair.

Again he tells her that she is beautiful, and then he tells her that she should sleep. Sleep has long eluded her, but she does not need to tell him that. Not when he's trying. Not when he's here. Even though every ounce of her is shaking on the inside, turned to pudding or jelly or some other gooey substance that doesn't quite want to keep its shape and stand on its own, she still has some part of her that does not want him to go.

Long ago, more months than she can count, she asked him to stay with her a little longer. That night, he'd given her his scarf and along the seashore they'd enjoyed one another's company and sweet nothings for only an evening. The next day, he'd been gone.

Now, she looks at him like a dying star, like a girl unraveled, with a lump in her throat and says "Come with me now, please." Because Moira Tonnerre does not want to be alone, not again, not tonight, not when he's back and she's seen him. Not when he could still be some awful dream taunting and haunting her midnight hours. So she picks up her cup again and empties it, forgetting the food because her stomach is too busy and too knotted to be hungry any longer, and then waits for him like she would be willing to wait a thousand years. Already, she's waited months and months and weeks and days and hours.

Would he come?

"Speaking." @Michael 

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