[P] i bet on losing dogs

[Marisol]

i'm not weeping, i'm not complaining
happiness is not for me.

The wind and the sea—don’t you wish you could be them?

I am them, Marisol wants to say.

She is the wind because of her wings. Because of the way she travels like a bird. Because of the hundred feathers that rustle in the breezes and chime against one another when she moves. And the sea is inside her newly-salted blood, inside the sharp, iron-edged teeth under those dark lips. It is guardian and master of the way she is awoken at night by the sound of an ocean that isn’t there, of the hunger that scrapes at the inside of her stomach and begs to be given iron. The wind and the sea—something inside her twists bitterly, convoluted. I am them, Marisol thinks, and nothing else.

Not girl, not lover, not queen or Commander. Just the wind and the sea, these two wild things that refuse to be good.

She swallows, with some effort, against the raggedness of her throat. Tries not to take not of the way the sharp, salty air burns the insides of her nostrils, or how she does not shiver at the cold the way a normal woman would. It is not in her anymore; it is hard to feel any kind of chill, even when she should. Somewhat sheepish, the Commander draws her head closer to her chest, as if against the wind. As if she feels it at all.

“Briar,” she repeats. Rolls the name on her tongue, falls silent for a moment with the sound pressed up against the roof of her mouth. Her ears flick back momentarily. Then with a blink Marisol turns her gray eyes to meet Briar’s—calm, curious in a way still quite restrained—and nods, as if in acceptance or encouragement. “I am Commander Marisol.”

Commander still, not Queen.
“Speaking.”

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