[P] only a star, only the sea

[Antiope]

Antiope.

The feeling of Isra’s touch in her hair is as rhythmic as the sea, as their breathing. Each strand of hair that drags across her neck is like a prayer, or a ballad. Like the strings of an instrument, Isra plays with gentle care and purpose. Antiope stays there, with their shoulders pressed together and the reminder of her hate pulsing deep inside her and all of her missing things spilling from her like a river.


There are things that she knows: what she is and what she is not and what she wants to be. That the press of their shoulders feels something like kinship, that she would stand here all night and allow Isra to braid every fallen soldier and lover and child into her mane. That something about here feels foreign and right in all the best ways. But her sapphire eyes look at every seed spread out before her and she isn’t sure she knows what to message to give them.

Antiope thinks of the hundreds of things that she would say to them if she could. That she loves them, which they would know. That she’s sorry, even though she knows there’s nothing she could have done to stop the gods and nothing for her to be sorry about. That she wishes they were here, even though its impossible and they are anyway, in her heart, if she will only let them be.

There are so many words on her tongue, so many wishes in her thoughts and wants in her heart. She looks at the field of dandelions at her hooves instead of the beach that had been there moments before. Her blue eyes are too bright and too sharp and the warmth of Isra leaning against her shoulder is more comfort than she could ever ask for. Antiope breathes.

She wants to be poetic. She wants to be thoughtful and witty and poignant. But as the storm rises up over the sea and the distant wind wails its promise to her ears, Antiope glances at Isra from the corners of her eye, and instead she says the truth. “I would say goodbye,” her voice is softer than the wind and the sea, and drifts like a fall leaf upon the air.

Her heart aches and burns with it, cries with it, because she has never thought about how true it is. She never got to say goodbye to them; one moment they were there with her and then they were all but gone. Stolen away, ripped from her life and this world. Her anger had sought closure in the destruction of the ones who had made her, but when everything inside her became sharp and black and red, all the soft parts of her were lost.

“I never told them goodbye.” In the end, it’s the one thing that hurts the most.

"Speaking."

credits | @Isra <3