[P] kiss me, and you will see how important I am;

[Marisol]

who are you
when it's all over?

The wind is bitter and bright around them; it sinks its teeth into Marisol and shakes, shakes, shakes, and she is suddenly jealous of the way Amaroq stands against it and feels no fear. 

How he loves the cold, and cannot shiver. 

How he does not have her same weaknesses. 

It would be reversed, she likes to think, in the sky: where she calls the wind currents by name, feels them out like the curves of a lover; where the cold doesn’t bite but kisses her, with all the reverence of something holy, or, worse, wanting.

In the darkness and the cold, Amaroq is like a shadow: even as she watches him (the pale fall of his hair, the sloping, black-ice shoulders) he seems to melt in the sea like he is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to the hungry waves all at once. Oh, to be beautiful. To be satisfied. Marisol cannot imagine.

Again she thinks of the sky, and dares to hope, woefully, it might swoop down to save her. She knows it will not.

There is a place at the edge of the world, just past the curve of Amaroq’s spine, where sky and sea melt into one. A place where the gray of the storm clouds melts like sugar into the black-blue of the ocean, easy and too-sweet, a place where there is no seam, but, instead, a kind of song - a dream that sings mournfully of how easy it is to get lost, if you’re willing to try, even if you aren’t;

Tell me of yourself, he says, and Marisol wonders what there is to tell.

I, she says, and pauses. Her eyes water against the wind. The slight gap in her mouth feels like a betrayal, or a mistake, or an opening to a portal she should not have let opened in the first place - God knows what will come out of it, now.

A used pair of wings, finishes Marisol bitterly, and she knits her eyebrows against the cold and the salt and the hot, black thing inside her that threatens horrible tears. It claws against the inside of her throat and her chest, it spirals behind her forehead; dizzy and nauseous, she bites out, A vessel for duty.

The truth always stings.

credits