i swallowed the sun and it burned my tongue and it burned my throat but it couldn't burn away your memory
They are both hollow like the whisper that longs to slip past her lips almost as fiercely as she is determined to stay silent. Every word she wants to say, wanted to say, is shattered against bark and starlight in the shadows of great mountains and strange beasts. She'd yelled until she couldn't. She'd cried until that, too, was lost. She'd lain there until there was nothing more to do between dying and returning. So she'd returned.
Then he walks in like a ghost, like a man defeated. His skin is sunk like hers, but there is muscle where she has only depressions and once-smoothed curves. Time unwinds around them like pulling thread from a spool, no tangles, no hiccups, just a continual turning like the turning in her head that has her dizzy, has her reeling, has her rocking and shaking and wondering somewhere deep, deep down where it is dark and it is quiet and it is lonely. He takes the dark glass and sets it down, letting it rattle on the countertop for but a moment before it stills, vibrations gone from the surface.
Moira hopes she's that calm, that cool, like a reflecting pool staring back at him with all the ghosts of the past and future and present in her eyes.
When his ribs crack under the strain of breathing and his heart cracks under the pain of beating, when his voice croaks out like the sweetest music she's heard in ages - sweeter than the song in her chest that keeps clawing at her heart, that Neerja keeps pushing and pushing and pushing in so that she won't stop moving, stop living, stop being - the phoenix cannot meet his eyes. Why? Why does it hurt to look at him even though every cell is on fire and reaching for him. Every piece of her straining to close those few inches - he's covered the distance, he's come back.
So is she refusing herself?
There are cracks in the crenellation hardened and re-hardened and broken again that are new and shining. They sing to her like he does, they remind her of her time Away. Of the forest and the wood and the moon-song that made her drunk and made her weak. She knows why she holds back, they are the shadows she cannot look at like she cannot meet his eyes.
Instead, her cup is discarded on some vacant surface next to a saucer still full of sweets and treats meant to be a gift, an offering, a prayer for the girl who looks like fire and feels like ice. There is no voice in her throat to rise, there is nothing but the taste of his skin when she crashes into him like the sea and buries her nose in his hair. Even the moon and tides couldn't pull her off him if they tried. There she stands, her breathing ragged and thin, her eyes closed more tightly than a clam shell.
She breathes him in and he smells of salt and blood and the sea. She breathes him in and there is Isra on his skin from weeks ago where he has not bathed in more than the ocean. She breathes him in and bares her teeth and bites his shoulder like a child when a tear slips out. "You should have, too," she whispers at last - hoarse and sore and cracked more than before. Even now, her words are but ash and midnight smoke.
