she did not want to move or to speak. she wanted to rest, to learn, to dream. she felt very tired
His entrance is both wanted and unwanted, creating wars in those tumultuous golden eyes, creating rifts in the soul that's already shredded and the heart she's learning to repaint the pieces on. If she paints long enough, she wonders if she can fool the onlookers into thinking it is whole and unbroken, into thinking someday she will be okay.
For someday, she will be okay.
But not today.
Not when Neerja falls into silence, only her tail flicking in agitation, ears tightly back as the Tonnerre girl's should be. They are not, only her eyes widen marginally when Asterion comes closer, when his sigh is the mirror of Michael's only days before. Why do they pop up from the grave, from some unknown place she could not follow, and hope for the best over and over again? Why must they insist on pulling the tapestry of her into nothing but tangled threads upon the floor?
She thinks it is not fair. She thinks it rather cruel and confusing.
Moira bites her lip at his voice, bites her cheek when the memories well up. Dancing. Wine. Forests. A world of their own. Love... Absence. It is a pyre of memories she wishes she could burn, wishes she would have burned when the gypsy pulled her in and offered for her to forget it all, forget Asterion and Caine and Estelle and everything that ever hurt her. Then, the phoenix could not accept such a curse, such a blessing. It truly would have unwoven everything she worked hard to pull together. Sewing her life into some beautiful cloth until her fingers bled and her brow was covered in sweat.
Instead, Moira chose immortality, let it wash the sweat from her brow, let it take her life into the end of eternity. Forever she would watch love die, forever she would feel its pain. The fruit was as bitter as it was sweet, as juicy as it made her thirst for a drink of something else.
"What do you want, Asterion?" And her voice breaks on his name, breaks like the tears that tumble out of dark eyes and fall down her cheeks. These are not waterfalls, not yet, but they are rivers of could-have-beens and almost-weres and what-ifs that she'd long ago tried to lay to rest. "Come, sit," she sighs, moving to the head of the bed so that he might take the foot.
Without her billowing curtain of black, she knows she will be vulnerable, but she is curious why he's back, why he's here, and instead chooses to walk the path of thorns again. There will be no happy ending at the end, she knows this. She needs answers more than she needs peace. Moira Tonnerre has given up on happy endings that she's involved in. Now, all she wants is answers that were not offered before.
Why? she wants to scream at him. Why did you hold me so tenderly and leave without a word? How could you? Was it me? Am I that unlovable? It swirls as Charybdis does, an awful whirlpool within that is without a beginning and without an end, simply pushed into some other dark corner and covered with a painting to pretend she isn't raw, that it was fine when he left.
@Asterion
