[P] I could have dared the loss

[Seraphina]

BECAUSE NOTHING SHE COULD SAY COULD CHANGE THE MELTED MUSIC OF HER SPACE
Because the privilege of her misery was something she could not disgrace / Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief / Because her grief required no imagination / Because it was raining outside the palace / Because there was no rain in her vicinity.

☼

“So,” Ereshkigal says, and laughs in a sound like the waves, “have you decided what you’re going to name them?”

It takes every ounce of Seraphina’s self-control not to reach for the bird – and, while reaching, to curve the sickle-shape of it around the slender curve of her throat and press down, hard. The violence of the impulse nearly shocks her, but it doesn’t; she has spent most of her life violent. What surprises her instead is the suddenness, the way that she can normally tolerate the demon’s prodding without batting an eye, the way that she nearly wears her bruises like they are begging to be disturbed, the way that she has the distinct feeling that she is standing on the edge of something precipitous, and any wrong move will send her falling somewhere sharp and dark, into some abyss even deeper and emptier than the ones she has tried to claw her way out of before.

She looks at the bird – the demon – for a moment, sharp glints of eyes alight with ill-contained loathing. (Ereshkigal laughs, again. She is always laughing, and it is never at anything good.) And then she looks away, towards the black, churning waves beating up against the shoreline, and she sets her jaw in a line and refuses to let any words out of her mouth, or to allow any of her wayward thoughts to leak out to her companion. Ereshkigal would only find them hysterical, she is sure. She would only encourage them. She would love to see her try to kill her – and she’d love it even more, when, inevitably, she faltered, when she could not do it.

And as for the names – she is trying not to think of them.

She knows what Viceroy named her, once, so many years ago; she knows because it is Seraphina, it is burning one, it is a cruel irony and a skin that she tries to shed whenever she meets some new stranger. Burning one, with her empty-eyed stare, with her perpetual frostbite, with her skin like a trail of ash and smoke. Burning one, unable to ever set herself ablaze. The name doesn’t suit her at all – and it probably wasn’t meant to. She’s sure that he meant for it to be unattainable, and a disappointment.

She is only like a fire in that she fears drowning.

Whatever her name was before that, she is sure that it was more beloved. She doesn’t recall her mother much, anymore, and she can’t remember when she could remember her last – at least in more than broken shards, pieces that didn’t quite fit together. She has the distinct feeling that she was loved, though she cannot remember it, and she is sure that she was given a loving name in kind.

Even if she remembered it, it would no longer be hers; but here is the question. Can she love these children, even knowing that she never, ever-

She has spent most of her life wondering if she could love anything. Unfortunately, she knows that she can, because there is this aching burn inside of her where all the things and the people that she used to love and lost used to be – but she is still not so sure that she can love anything right. She has tried to console herself. She has tried to tell herself that she can take care of them, at least, even if she doesn’t know how to love them like she should. That would be something, at least, more than what she’d seen granted to so many children who grew up in the sands of the Mors-

-but it would not be enough, and she knows it, but, if she thinks about it for very long at all, she finds herself overwhelmed again. Hopeless, or maybe helpless, if there is any real distinction between the two.

She shoulders it. Licks salt off her lips.

(Ereshkigal is probably right – she can’t put off thinking about it forever.)

The sky is clear and winter-grey, and the waves are frothy and darker than she remembers, swirled with grit and kelp; it almost reminds her of ink, and that of a maze she stepped into so long ago that it feels like she lived it in another life. (It probably was; she does not need Ereshkigal’s insistence to tell her that she should have died, after her fight with Raum.) It is cold, but she doesn’t want to be in Solterra right now, and she hasn’t in weeks. She does not want to think of the sun, or of the sun god, or of the kingdom left in ashes and stone in her wake. She does not want to consider if this is meant to be some twisted blessing or some belated punishment. Most of all, she does not want to be seen by anyone who might recognize her, and the world outside of the desert knows her less.

She pulls the yellow fabric of her scarf tighter about her throat, shields her face; pulls it over her eyes so she cannot find herself looking again, disbelievingly, at her sides, and the way that she can barely recognize them as her own.

---

@Eik || <3 <3 <3 || june jordan, "what great grief has made the empress mute?" ; title from "eurydice," h.d.
Sera || Eresh

@

[Eik]

W

as it foolish to assume they would meet again?


He did not think so, not at first. But to his growing fear (and secret relief) time did not stand still for Eik-- even when the years stopped touching those he cared for most. It was the birth of his daughters that changed everything. Before then, he had no measure of time. Seasons came and went, and he did not stop to recognize that time was not a circle- that each moment, when it passed, took something with it he would never again experience. He did not witness his own life-- did anyone?-- except as a blur of dull color and motion, every memory a different tide of emotion, most of it tinted (unrightfully so) with either nostalgia or hurt.

But the instant Avesta and Aspara were born, they were the two stars by which Eik measured time’s passage. First steps, first words. First birthday. Second. When they turned two, he wondered for the first time if they would never meet Seraphina or Bexley or Asterion. If he would never see them again. It had always seemed, for some reason, inevitable-- he had taken it for granted. He had forgotten, or perhaps just closed his eyes, to the fact that we are all only given so much time… and to die having fulfilled every wish, lived out every assumption, it was either a madness or a godlike management of expectation.

This is not what he is thinking about when he walks along the beach. He’s in the place beneath words, grey and hazy and reaching, always reaching. (for that white veil, that tattered curtain) Not even the sharp briny tang of the wind could penetrate the shroud of his thoughts. But still, it was always a comfort to be near the water. The lull or the rage of the waves, the hymn or sigh of its song, the endless ways of its being-- all of it he embraced in ways he could not embrace the living. All of it he understood, on some level beneath language, in a way he could not understand people. (in many ways Eik’s magic was wasted on him, for he could read minds but it was often the case that he could not make sense of them.)

It’s hard to say who sees who first. When she turns her head he’s already looking, but who’s to say what he sees?

All of that doesn’t matter. He walks faster, blinking away his thoughts, rising back to the world of the living. The air is cold and damp. She’s wearing a scarf, a feminine bloom of color amidst a landscape of grey. It challenges the piercing color of her eyes, and it loses.

“Seraphina.” The four syllables pace back and forth, so achingly familiar they make his jaw ache.

Eik slows as he draws near and reaches tentatively to her round belly, stopping just short of touching. His breath fans warm and gentle across her skin. He can’t help but grin. There are two- he can sense their dreaming minds. He is instantly struck by memories of another set of twins, and he would do anything to wind back the clock, re-live every precious minute with them. In the end it doesn’t matter how much you savor all those little moments- when they’re gone, they’re gone for good.

There’s so much to say. So much more to not say. He meets her gaze with eyes dark and wondering. “Are you afraid?” He had been, at first-- especially when he learned there would be two. But it seems the hardiest things take root in pain and sorrow, and the most beautiful blooms thrive in landscapes once washed in the dark greys and blues of fear.

There are so many things he wants to tell her. But there is a lot of time between who they are now and who they used to be, and all the many weak parts of Eik are feeling panicky and slippery. Uncertain and inadequate. Foolish, foolish, foolish! (There is a room he steps into, and there he pounds his head against the wall. It makes him feel better- you find what works and you cling to it.) I’m a failure and a fool. I accept this. I-- “It’s nice to see you,” he exhales. He tries to let go. “I always thought… I always thought it would be different.”

When he spoke he thought he meant meeting again-- he always figured their reunion would be in Solterra. But he realizes that maybe he means everything. He thought everything would be different.

(which, of course he would. Fool.)

@Seraphina <3

[Seraphina]

BECAUSE NOTHING SHE COULD SAY COULD CHANGE THE MELTED MUSIC OF HER SPACE
Because the privilege of her misery was something she could not disgrace / Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief / Because her grief required no imagination / Because it was raining outside the palace / Because there was no rain in her vicinity.

☼

Since her battle with Raum, nothing in Seraphina’s life has felt entirely real.

Now, as she looks down the shoreline and meets eyes with the man who used to be her Emissary, she cannot help but feel that everything around her is even less real than usual. She had barely become accustomed to inhabiting a world where seeing Eik and Bexley was completely ordinary when, abrupt as a lightning strike, she found herself living in a place where it was almost inconceivable to ever see either of them again. None of this feels quite right. Not the way that age is beginning to show in his face, in the way that he moves along the sand; not in the way that the waves leap at the shoreline with tender touches of foam. They should be in Solterra, years ago, and-

She hasn’t wanted to see anyone, lately. (She hasn’t wanted to see anyone in years.) Something curls in her throat, and she isn’t sure if it’s some kick from the still-unnamed twins inside of her or if it is her own, gnawing anticipation. Still, when he says her name, she feels something. Seraphina is not sure if she wants to laugh or to cry, and, if she wants to cry, if it is from relief or something a bit closer to pure, bitter-bright agony.

“Eik.” His name settles on her tongue with an aftertaste of oak tree. Somehow, it only feels halfway-familiar, and the thought makes her throat sting. She feels like his name should belong to someone else, someone younger, someone she watched mouth at the edges of parchment in the library once-

but if there is one thing that she has learned, or one thing that she knows innately, it is that she is no longer that Seraphina any more than he is still that Eik.

(Nothing ever feels gone like it should; in her half-life, her waking grave, it never quite feels over. She still wakes up feeling dead, even with the twitch of twins - twins - in her stomach.)

“Yes.” She is surprised at how easy the admission comes, because she doesn’t want it to; she has never wanted to admit to a weakness, least of all in the face of someone who followed her. (Followed her once, now. Not anymore, and never again. The impulse lingers, regardless, a desire to seem strong in the face of adversity – though she isn’t sure that anyone but her would understand her situation as an adversity, at least in a glance. Most expectant mothers are happy, and she is-) “I don’t think I’ve…” She trails off, pressing a sigh to the back of her mouth, and then finishes her sentence. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so afraid of anything in my life.” And when she says it, she can’t quite bring herself to tell if it is true or not. There is a part of her that is only just beginning to untangle how much of her life she has spent afraid of one thing or another, and, more than that, afraid of admitting or acknowledging her own fear in the first place.

It’s nice to see you, he says, and she knows, in her own way, that he means it. (Perhaps that is why something inside of her seems to settle, that persistent guilt that scratches at the edges of her ribcage whenever she runs into anyone that she used to know. Guilt for failing. Guilt for fading, for falling out of sight, for disappearing. And now, lately, guilt for never making anything of herself in all that time she spent disappeared, for never becoming better from it.)

“You too,” comes her quiet reassurance, more urgent than she expects. “I’m – I’m glad to see you again.” I was beginning to think that I never would goes unsaid. (So does I’m glad that you’re alive and I’m glad that you’re here. As she has grown older, she has a feeling that she has become host to so many graves, so many disappearances. At least she cannot count him among them.)And when he says that he always thought that it would be different, here is a laugh in her mouth that isn’t a laugh, an upward curve of her lips that is only the facsimile of a smile, and she says, “And so….did I,” and it is hard to say if she means that she always thought that they would meet again under different circumstances or if she still finds the past two years – nearly three, now, when she thinks of it – unimaginable.

“Have you been well, Eik?” And she leaves so much unspoken, but she does wonder – how is Isra? How are his two daughters? She’s never met either of them. With something of a pang, it occurs to her that she doesn’t even know their names.

---

@Eik || <3 <3 <3 || june jordan, "what great grief has made the empress mute?" ; title from "eurydice," h.d.
Sera || Eresh

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