the birdsong might be pretty,
but it's not for you they sing
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but it's not for you they sing
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For a moment both her and the rabbit watch with with the same look, the same out of place tilt to heir heads. And maybe for a moment, for the span on his too-long breath, the moon is caught in both their eyes like fireflies in a glass. Or maybe it's only that the light is caught there for a moment, one beautiful glorious moment, before it starts to die.
Red blinks at the same time the rabbit does. The moon dies.
Outside the snow is starting to roll in like a herd of bison and the sea is thundering against the cliff-side. Beyond the windows Terrastella is full of ice, and snow, and death. But in here, when she looks at him, there is only the low hum of a hundred sad sea songs echoing over and over again until her ears are ringing with them. There is only the sadness, the sorrow, the space between words that seems as bottomless as the black sky above them. Snow is melting off his eyelashes and it looks to her like tears, like an echo of the sadness rolling black around and around her soul.
There are a hundred words that should come out instead of, “don't.” She doesn't know if she telling him not to be sorry, or not to look away, or not to be standing in her house that hasn't know anyone but her for so, so long. Red starts to pour a glass of wine because it's the only way she knows how to calm all this sadness in her that is threatening to come out as a scream that will never end, or s enough tears to flood the sea. That do not hangs in the air, caught between the silence in the sigh of wine hitting crystal. Moonlight sifts through the window again and turns the wine to blood, to life, to something more than water and root.
Her own inhale is too fast, prey fast. The rabbit closes his eyes and settles down to dream. The sight settles something primal in her, that part of her that will always be seal in the sea watching a shark cut through the sunlit waters.
When she looks back him her eyes are too green, too sad, too promising of both tears and endless joy, too full of pleading for him to look at her again. She is too full. “I'm not waiting for anyone.” She grasps her glass with her natural magic just to make her body feel like it's doing something other than aching. “I always pour two...it makes....” Her eyes look down to the table, to the wine that was the last harvest she had with Horace. She does not look back up, not until---
“It makes me feel less alone.” Outside the snow is still coming in like bison, like a herd, like endless flakes of snow that are never alone. Snow could be melting on her lashes too by the time she looks back at him. She doesn't ask him, but holds out the glass for him anyway, hoping that he'll see that sad sea song in her eyes and understand. It's the best wine Novus has ever known.
“I'm Red. How was the festival?” She asks it like a hallelujah, like a prayer that tonight there is something other than silence. It all comes out too rushed anyway.
What she really wants to ask him is why he is here instead of there. She doesn't.
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