Perhaps it is the way the crowd looks like a tide that makes her so eager to turn away when the poet pauses. The soft heart in her chest is aching and her lungs feel heavy with salt-water instead of spiced smoke. Her eyes linger on the girl, on the lines of her face pulled so tightly. It feels like she's cracked open her own skin before her mirror at home and looked at all the broken pieces floating sea-less beneath. The thought makes her sway closer until they are feathers and spots, sorrow and sea, sadness and wanting enough to die for.
Red remembers the way it felt to be tangled with her sister seals, watching bright-eyed below the water when the sailor's boats passed overhead. She remembers the fear of it, the thrill, the way this form of her wanted out of that form. It felt like a dream then. And now---
Now she's not sure what anything is supposed to feel like anymore.
So she smiles because it seems the normal thing to do, pretending like all the pieces are her aren't rolling like clouds inside her skin. “They are.” Her voice pauses, waivers like a gull in the breeze (or like a vine in late fall). Red thinks she should say something more, something profound, something about loneliness, hope or survival. She thinks--
The look on her face waivers between something sad and something almost feral. A piece of her that remembers the look of a shark swimming in great circles over her head trembles. It demands the wind in her hair, the feel of shadows nibbling at the edges of her until she's nothing more than a blur. She remembers what little she knows of poetry and how she loves it so.
A feather brushes against the hollow between one rib and the next.
“Would you like a drink?” Her look swings to the side of almost, almost, almost and the way her eyes look at Daunt's face seems like a poetry of its own.
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