“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
He is leaving.
There had been a time Isra asked him to stay, wished with her whole vengeful heart that Michael would lay down and sleep beneath her star-freckled sky, lay his bones in the dirt of her city like a bed or a grave, turned to gold. Now she asks him to go, to cross her oceans and wage her wars simply because she had said will you come? and Michael would hurl himself into the sea, cast himself into the heat of the sun, walk until his flesh became paper and his bones had worn down to dust--if only she asked it of him.
Does he want to go? When Michael thinks of fire, of birds reborn from the ashes, of the clatter of hoves on the market streets and words said under the din of a crowd, he starts to think, I don't know. The thin but definite line between yes and no becomes fuzzy and hard to see, much less read. Something in him is a bird when it hears the name Moira - the sort of bird that flees when a name is not church bells or divine suffering, the sort of bird that looks at a smooth thing, one that cannot break the skin, and thinks, this will be the death of me.
In the end, he is no closer to the answer, so Michael goes to the city with his heart in the back of his mouth and chases it down with a drink that makes him grimace as it claws its way down his throat.
---
The warden finds Michael just as a waitress plunks another glass down before him, squinting when she smiles. He doesn't hear or see her approach -- the only sound that registers is the alternating pounding and keening of his heart; the only thing he sees is the light from the fireplace as it dances in the curve of his glass (and the empty one next to it.)
Hey, she says, as if it is so easy to do so: just open your mouth, let something out, say it because something--anything--needs to be said. It is almost a particular comfort to look up and see Morrighan, frowning down at him, backlit by the flame until she slides into place. It's strange how Denocte has grown on him when few things can. It is strange that what floods him is not panic but what feels like relief, as cool and soft as the rain.
He almost laughs. He worries if he does it might sound like he feels: tense and mirthless.
You still owe me a story, she adds, and he nods. Michael does still owe her a story. He raises his glass to his lips and smiles against the rim.
"Hello to you too," he purrs before drinking, one long pull that pushes his lips together as it goes down. She is looking at the fireplace opposite them, close, and he is studying her like his favorite book. The hearth calls to her, begging to grow and to grow and to grow until it has eaten the bar and all her indecision whole. When he finds something in the set of her mouth that reminds him of his, Michael looks away. There is a bird in him, beating its wings.
Michael asks, "I must stress again how incredibly subpar I am at storytelling -- according to the queen, at least." He says this and the world beats for a moment, like it stutters under the weight of the word. "Maybe you should have a few, before that. For your sake." He cannot quite remember if it's honesty or self-deprecation. He wonders if it matters, really.
@morrighan
