“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.”
Michael cannot remember the last time he went to the ocean.
(He does. There had been rocks against his ankles that had turned to dandelion seeds which drowned in the water. There had been endless grief and limitless hope and a queen and her dragon and he had said will you come home? and she had.
They had gone home to a deeper grief, to the city on fire. And it had not been the first or last time that Michael had run from Denocte when it needed him most. He remembers with the clarity of a hawk in the hunt.
But his guilt is the only thing louder than his fear - and so he does not remember, if he can help it.)
He comes to the ocean now as a child, small and lost, tugging at her coatsleeves. If the sea turns her face on him, he thinks, maybe she will give him the answers. Maybe she will rise up from her prodigious basin and take him by the hand, ring her church bells and declare his path as she takes his hand and leads him toward it.
If only it were that easy. He is ankle-deep in the incoming tide, wet sand stuck to the dirty white of his feathers, numbed by the tooth-shattering chill of the late winter sea. He is thinking nothing, just the blissful black void of a mind that has turned a blind eye to itself until it is dizzy from going in circles. The sea does not rise up from the sand and she does not lay his shaking hands in hers and Michael is blue-lipped and suffocating, wordlessly begging for--something.
He closes his eyes, tight enough that their corners crease, and turns to go. The thick white curtain of his mane follows him through the surf toward land, where it drips and drips and drips until the scarf around his neck is soaked through and his shoulders hurt from shivering. It is somehow still better than anything else.
This is when he sees her. Its like looking in a mirror: the dull gold of her coat in gray winter light, the sharp blue of her eyes. It makes him feel strange in some distant way, like waking up from a bad dream. He smiles like the sun in the dead of winter, bleak and grim.
"I know that look," he grins mirthlessly. It is either a curse or a compulsion, whatever drives Michael to speak when he sees her. He has not quite decided which. "What are you thinking of?"
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