“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.”
She holds on like Michael might hold on to something, like Michael is holding on: the white-knuckled grip of a beast suspended above a void, with nothing but claws and grit to keep it from falling. Michael sometimes looks up at his own hands--sweaty palms, bruised fingers, calloused and bloody and blue from the cold--and wonders why he's so scared to let go. Sometimes Michael looks down, at the pit beneath, yawning like so many wide mouths, as hungry as it is patient and as patient as it is deep. When he looks down, Michael knows.
Fear. It is fear that keeps him alive. It is fear that keeps him from living. And so the wheel of entropy turns.
Between words he can hear the guard changing shifts down the hall. Moira's light gathers in Michael's hair and makes a sad painting of them. Where the smooth stone walls had been the blue-gray of dawn, only just brushed by fingertips of her lantern, now it gathers like fog in the slope of the vaulted ceiling, glows orange and yellow and white against the sharp corners of each counter stacked with baskets of fruit. Michael smiles at her.
Michael thinks he could never do anything else. He wonders why, but he doesn't wonder quite long enough to find the answer. He is glad, still, that she cannot see his face, smoothed in a smile far too kind for the things he has done, the man he has been--specifically toward her.
Her life feels like a dream, or a nightmare. Michael does not pretend it is not partly his fault. Michael does not stop the breath he holds until it hurts his head, or how he sighs like an old king when he lets it go.
"I'm so sorry." he says, because if he whispers his voice will break and it will fall to the ground with the rest of the things he is to cowardly to say. "I'm so, so, goddamn sorry." He is. He is so sorry he wishes he could fling himself into the sun and burn away like so many dead stars. He is so sorry he can't quite remember who or what he is.
It takes everything he has--the foundation of Michael shakes with the effort--but he lets her go, and steps back, and cool, dark air rushes in to take his place. In her light the thick sheet of his mane obscures his eyes, which fall under its cutting shadow, but his mouth is screwed into some expression between grim, bleak hopelessness and a frankly untoward amount of affection.
"No." he answers. "It absolutely wasn't."
He wonders if she knows. Because Isra had called him away, and he had followed. Isra had asked 'will you come, will you stay?' and Michael had nodded like clanging church bells. He had gone for Isra, away from everything. But he knows, now, when he can see himself wreathed in a crown of light in her eye's reflection-- he had come back for her.
If only it were that easy.
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