[P] if you could call it living

[Michael]

"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."

Michael smiles as if someone else is smiling for him, as if each motion is a practiced and deliberate routine that brings the cup back to his mouth and asks him to drink until it's empty. 

(I wonder if Bexley Briar is right, if the sea of her grief is primordial and black enough that Michael cannot swim in it, even clothed in centuries of suffering. I wonder if Michael might look at it and feel, for the first time, that he might drown in the undertow. I wonder if he would care.)

Somewhere there is the groan of machinery, the whistle of stoves and cinnamon and a breeze that blows the hot sun down his back, onto the cobblestone where there's dust gathering against the curb outside of their pocket of silence. Michael still has not put down his teacup - he is holding it in a grip that trembles - because surely the tinkle of it would dispel this magic moment where she is laid bare and even as she speaks he is swearing to guard each and every secret as closely as he can.

He shouldn't look. He shouldn't. Shouldn't see the fog of her gaze and hear the breath sucked in too quick and think Caligo help me, like it's a hymn and not a prayer but it blooms in him nonetheless, cool and blue. And he shouldn't stare at her with his shaky grip and bend his expression into one of concern, but he does - it is not a beautiful expression, and it is not particularly poetic. 

And the sin of all sins, the one thing he hopes, is that his face does not smooth out the same way hers does, following her into this song where she is not shattered glass and he is not some old, sunken ship.

Bexley says to him, I don't think you're unremarkable, and Michael has to stop himself from dissolving where he stands. "And I don't think you're irritating," he says like it's a secret, like he has known this all along but just now found the words for it. He cannot quite find the reason why.

Michael pauses to set his teacup down, finally. The sun glances off the rim and off his body and off hers and the breath he takes feels too warm and too slow. "I'm curious why you think you are."