With so much nothing stretching out around her there is something in her that aches to be standing still. A beast in her is howling above a distant corpse buried in the brush. And the beast is hungry, and fuming, and wanting all at once. Thana quivers with the feeling of it all, of the way her knees are trembling like rusty cogs beneath her flesh. She wonders if he can see it, the way all the bits are her are trying to crawl their way to outside.
She does not ask him, but it's there in the wild blaze in her purple eyes.
Sometimes she thinks she's a thing not 'made' but one still being formed. Over and over pieces of her are being cracked wide and reforged into something harder, something hollow, something that wants, and wants, and wants. And when she cocks an ear back at the forest it's like she's straining to hear the call of the something only she can find.
That ear turns back to him when he whispers. Each inch of her body strains to hear it, to see if there is anything in the sound of him that echoes that distant, primordial call of the forest. And if there is, she tries to catch it by holding her nose in the space between them full of sound, wind and winter. It's the gesture of both the doe and the wolf. It's ancient, a throwback to the world when the world was wild, and reckless, and walls were only the space between nightmares and dreams. In the space between them, when she inhales his words, there is the suggestion of pine-trees, and birch, and magic.
Thana wants to ask him what he's waiting for. She wants to ask him how he can stand so still when every inch of her is screaming to run, run, run until she finds the end of winter and the beginnings of spring. She exhales and tries so very hard not to make it sound like a sigh, like she's pulling one of her sharp pieces loose. “I shouldn't.” The words come out like a sigh anyway. Like the sigh on the winter wind hanging to a snow-coated pine. Or maybe it's only like the sigh of death, the knell of it, and shje just wants to imagine it sounds like something else.
The snow crunches under her weight when she starts to pace. Her body is still telling her to run, but he's strange enough (almost as strange as her) that she wants to linger a little longer before she listens to the aching of her rusty cog knees. “I've always like the endless of winter. We could run forever through the snow and see nothing slumber and death.” We comes out as easy as breathing. Each day it's easier and easier to pretend all her edges aren't fraying and her magic isn't screaming for desolation.
Each day it's easier to think of flowers.
“But I miss them now, even though I should not.” There is that weight in her eyes again, like she's waiting for him to turn his ear to the woods and head the call too. Like she's praying he might tell her to run, run, run and never stop. Even when her heart gives out, don't stop.
She should run. She should leave.
And yet she moves closer to him, brushes her rib-cage against his feathers. She tells her magic and her aching, hush, hush, hush. “Do you?” Another sigh, another knell, because she wants to pretend for a little bit longer.
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