“I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new.”
A song is singing in her blood. The stinging sound her glass tears make when they fall to hit her knees is nothing more than another melody. There is the low hiss of rage, the whispers their lashes make when they blink away the darkness and brightness of their gazes. Below all that is the bang, bang of her heart that slows to match the beat of Eik's.
She would ask him if he can hear it, the way her entire soul sings at the nearness of him, but she already knows he knows he can.
It's easy to look at Eik and forget that there is still the blood crusted on her throat (easier still to forget that now part of her wants blood too). There is no violence here, in the lavender air between them with clover in their kisses. There is only love and the sound it makes when it falls as easily as an apple from this tongue.
“Liar,” She whispers and even that sounds like love when she rises before the echo of it has faded. Isra presses her nose to the pulse just bellow his jaw and she counts each beat of his heart like it's the number of all the wealth in the world. “I will not forget a single sunrise.” Her lips follow the pathway of his veins, down his throat. Then across his chest where she plants a single kiss to the center of it.
There's a moment when she wants to trace each of his muscles with her lips. Isra wants to cover him in stories written in touches instead of ink. The heat of the fire rising him in scorches her lips and she doesn't want to call it rage and fury, yet. She doesn't want to call it anything but love and when she decides to be brave, passion.
But when she meets his gaze, and it's made cold and guarded by the fire, Isra knows it's not only love between them, not anymore. Part of her, the part that remembers how it felt to be branded, wants to run from the dark glint in his eyes. It's only when she pulls away to brush the hair back from his eyes that she remembers that she too feels an inferno of cold fire in her chest.
She knows that she would raze the world with steel flowers and glass ivy if anyone touched Eik in hate. Just the thought of it terrifies her both with the possibility and with the way she feels the anger and welcomes it. It's not just the world that terrifies her anymore, it's herself she's scared of now.
I understand, my love, what this will make of us, of me. Forgive me. She lets the words rise to the surface of mind, a slick of oil on the ocean of her empathy.
Isra brushes the sweet clover sticking to her lips across his brow, trying to make things between then gentle and innocent again. It's strange, how sweet her lips are and how cold and trembling her voice is. “Me and a crow, called Raum, had a disagreement on what makes a blade and how orphans should be given homes.” She says no more, afraid to tell him how she grew a meadow of metal flowers. Fear about what Eik will think of her, when it's not just wonder she wields but terror, turns all the rest of her words to ash.
A glint of sun shines off her dried blood and makes it looks like a string of rubies draped across her throat. “He has no blades anymore but those made of his body. I turned his knives to daises. ” Isra smiles then and brushes their lips together. And for the first time she thinks of that ring of wounds around her throat like a crown.
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