“And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.”
Nothing in the room catches her in quite the same way as Marisol's smile does. Isra feels like a moth, like a unicorn flying too close to the sun. She feels like a million things that exist in that gray place between life and between the fire. Her own look falters and waivers like a field beneath a storm.
Isra's doesn't see shark teeth and she doesn't see gray pits on the surface of the moon. In Marisol's eyes she can see a smoke cloud that hasn't yet chosen the shape in which it wants to climb the night-sky. She doesn't see teeth but stars, each a map that points in the direction of some new wonder Isra hasn't yet learned of. She knows of wishes and dreams but nothing of flying and less of fierceness.
And oh she wants to learn!
So she rises up her throat to Marisol like an offering, and she wonders what secrets the Commander will divine from the places where the satin slips back to reveal a necklace of teeth marks. She wonders too what she makes of the way Fable leaves them to wind through the crowd like a shadow made of cool-water and brine instead of blackness. The music rushes over her like a wave and then she's not wondering but taking.
Isra decides to take the night, to make it her own. That brush of Marisol's lips (the ones that hide maps made of stars) is all the permission she needs tonight. She follows. Her own nose traces the curl of the pegasus's hip, then a wing, then that neck that is so much bolder than her own, delicate unicorn neck. “It's ok.” Their shoulders touch and Isra almost sighs for the way feathers sing against her skin.
Maybe she knows what it feels like to fly after-all.
“I will teach you.” She whispers just loud enough that her voice might sound like a song under that crying harp-string. Isra says nothing more and thinks only of Marisol as she leads her away into the crowd so that they might dissolve into the music (and become something more than two mares from different words).
The dawn is soon enough for thinking and she'll worry about the rest of the world then. Tonight there is only Marisol.
(and that thought that if she met her sooner the world would have been a little different).
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