“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”
Oh, Michael is an omen sewn into flesh and bone, some thing that walked out of a dream and watched as the world around him folded itself into a nightmare. Here he stands with snow thick in his mane, thick in his ragged winter coat, thick in its wind which blows through the caverns of his body and howls to him black stories of the north. If he were superstitious, if he had not lived far too long to believe in some greater force blowing ill will in his direction, he might take her omens to heart. What is another parable among the many?
The golden horse is watching her, meets her eyes even before she is on her way. A tremble rolls from the top of his head to the base of his tail. She walks like a creature posessed, some ancient thing birthed back into a world that she no longer relates to.
She walks like him.
Every year is a threshold and as it always must be, some things don't get to cross with him. Michael is looking at Boudika and seeing someone else; his insides sing to him dark songs about girls with skin made of bubbling poison and he could recall with perfect clarity every angle of her face but he can no longer put a name to it.
"I could ask you the same," he says, as if Michael were the type to throw up arms.
Them he smiles. The light of it spills from him as if he were a dam waiting to crack. The irony is that he feels like an emptied reservoir or perhaps the flooded lowlands left in its wake.
Still, he smiles. She does not say what she means and Michael is an ocean of things he was too cowardly to speak. "I don't like the city." Michael answers, but that isn't quite true. He loves the city. He loves to stroll its streets in early afternoon light when the shops are closed and the rest of the Court is just rousing from their homes.
It's just that, "Well-- I prefer to... freeze to death, I guess." Michael is still smiling but he is thinking death, death, death while he looks at her, while he remembers a toxic thing, while he feels for perhaps the first time just how cold he is, inside and out. He had not wanted the day to go like this.
@boudika
