[P] so long as you don't mind a little dying;

[Marisol]

I will follow you down
until the sound of my voice will haunt you

He looks—he looks—

Just the same. Just like the boy she’d loved. The one she’d missed like a phantom limb, whom she sees now with a hallucinatory clarity: the same eyes, dark-wet and shining like stones at the bottom of a river; the same tousled, blackish hair, the same look on his face, half plaintive and half guilty; the same thin star on his head, a sliver of moonlight, a coldly white spilling of starshine like runoff from a creek, Vespera’s halfhearted attempt at marking the site of a Judas kiss.

Mari swallows. Her jaw tightens; her teeth grind. Perhaps, she thinks (not without a tight twinge of guilt in her stomach) this would all be easier if he had the decency to come back broken, at least bruised, and let her pretend that he had suffered, too. What a sick thing to think. What a terrible way to feel. She can’t breathe through the iron weight that sits heavy on her chest and the pressure it places on her already-struggling lungs. Every inhale feels like the unfortunate grit of breathing in sand. Her eyes sting with the salt of tears, the wind coming off the ocean, the part of her that wishes—

he had never, would never, come back at all.

In her ears there is the rush-and-howling of a cold, sharp breeze,  the throbbing, humming sound of her blood rising like a tide. When he says I am so sorry she almost cannot hear it. When he says I am so sorry, the sound of Marisol’s pain—a sound unbearably close to the noise of a struggling heartbeat, a throbbing pulse, a constant, unwavering blood-ache—nearly drowns it out.

I wish it would have, she thinks, and every inch of her feels raw, raw, raw. Cut open and doused in saltwater.

I don’t want it widely known that I’m…returned, Asterion says, and the Commander flinches visibly, harder than she can ever remember turning away from the point of a spear or the edge of a blade. Her whole body tightens like a wire. And I hear that Novus is seeing its first true peace in years. That Terrastella is prospering under its queen.

Oh. That stings. It should be a compliment (Marisol’s eyes water). It should feel good, validating, the kind of proof-of-goodness she has been chasing since childhood. But instead it feels like failure—condescension—the pinprick of a knife twisted deep into the chest and turning, turning, turning. 

And in a way that is as unlike her as anything can be, Mari’s voice breaks in half when she begs: “What do you want, Asterion? Not to be widely known—that you’re alive. So you’ve come home,” she says, her tone half angry and half heartbroken, “just to leave again? Leave—me again?”

Now it is her turn for those gray eyes to say please, please, please.

“Speaking.”

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