“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.”
He had watched her, had stood on the gently rocking deck of her ship, had felt its wood solid beneath and the sea below that, dark and blue and cold. He had watched her and something like bile had filled him, anger and sadness and fear all lumped together until it was too big to swallow. When he did finally swallow it, the thing sat in his chest like lead and made him heavy, and tired, and so, so cold.
He had run. As he had run many times before. As he will surely run many times again. Back to Denocte. Back to her country. Back to her emissary.
It does not hurt to love Moira, ill-fated and unspoken as it is. It does not hurt to look at her and wonder who she is, who she will become. He does not feel all twisted up and angry and scared when he thinks of the future. When Michael thinks of Moira he thinks of the soft black of her hair when he touches it, of the steadiness with which he receives her unease. He thinks of sad smiles and some far-off guilt and saying "I would never lie," over and over without being heard
but,
none of it hurts. And he thinks he deserves one thing that doesn't hurt. Just the one.
At first he doesn't recognize her--which is not to say that she isn't burned into him, that her name is not written on each of his bones, that his breath does not catch and then stop like he's never needed oxygen at all, because it is, and it does--
--but he's never seen her in the city, backlit by shops dotted here and there with the blue-gray silhouette of a man buying flowers or a woman sampling tea. He had thought, almost, that Isra belonged to the wilderness, to either her castle or the tall spruce of the mountains. And when he sees her, the blue-green glint of her scales, her hair falling in waves over her back, and uncanny curl of her horn, he almost wonders why she's there at all.
He sees her and it does hurt, in a way that cuts too deep, in a way that makes Michael scared and upset and guilty. He sees her and his bones bend and break as a unit, snapping one by one in the back of his throat.
"Isra?" Michael whispers like he knows she'll hear.
And suddenly, Michael doesn't know what to say.
@isra
