drowning never felt so much like flying as it does right now
He looks and he does not, he flirts with only his eyes so dark and blue, he begs with his skin against her skin and never having uttered a word. Michael is tearing the phoenix apart brick by brick, garden walls tumbling down as vines creep through and flowers blossom. Ancestors help her, she's trying so hard to look away, but can't look anywhere but at him, like a helpless lamb ready to be led to slaughter, like a girl and a boy in soft flickering candlelight with the buzz of laughter and joy in the background, like she isn't doomed eternally to be a wonderer who never knows a true home. But she falls anyway, she stares and stares and stares. Moira's magic begs to push away the hair from his eyes, to unveil the bright blue stars that she wants to look only at her. It is a knot in her chest, it siphons her will away bit by bit, and when he smiles. Sweet mother have mercy, when he smiles like that she's undone.
The phoenix looks away then, gossamer lashes at last hiding near glowing amber eyes, the freckles on her face too bright, her skin too hot, everything too loud and too quiet and never enough. It's never enough. But that smile is. There aren't butterflies in her stomach then, but a whole flock of riotous birds crowing and screaming to whatever thing will listen. So she rises, she rises tall and proud and shy; aching and excited and unsure; a breathless thing on the edge of another cliff, another cycle bound to repeat itself, and yet so ready to spread her wings at last - to learn to fly again and again and again. She will burn through the chains that bind her, she will melt the iron pointed at her throat, she will change the stars and make her own galaxies of wonder if she must.
When she passes Michael, she begs, "Don't look at me like that," and it is hoarse and note entirely what she means at all. "Don't look at me like you've found salvation." And she thinks that she is only a shooting star, something destined to fall as a meteorite and crash, burning, broken, in some strange world where everything will hurt. Moira cannot tell him this, not when the crisp air forces her nearer to him, sharing his body heat and offering her own to ward off the chill. Not when they head towards the sea that Isra loves and hates so much, that she yearns to walk along to remember another boy in another time, that she wants to make new and beautiful memories alongside Michael with tonight.
The ocean, she's found, is becoming a place for newness, for growth. It gives and it takes and it never asks if it should or if it could. It simply does as it will. Moira thinks that a lovely and selfish thing, but is drawn back to it all the same over and over.
