I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
He sees her throat move in a swallow and feels as though he’s watching her ready for a swing. How many times have they leveled with each other with the sea alongside them, or the stars overhead, or a pitted battlefield between? And still he can’t read her, not between the whispers of his hopes and the gnawing of his fears, and the mist that begins to rise then is not all the ocean’s doing. It might be funny, if he’d even noticed; it’s been a long time since he’s had such a loose grip on his magic.
There is so much to tell her (there were so many monsters in that world, Marisol, and so many wonders) and to warn her (Commander, we need to watch the island - it isn’t right, it’s too much like where I was) and to ask her (oh, my friend, do you think it’s possible to meet Death? For something happened to me that I don’t understand). But his tongue is a deer tangled in wire, and hers is a stone, and when she bodily flinches his heart does the same.
Now there are tears silvering his own eyes, more saltwater for the sea. And at last she speaks, in a voice he never imagined could have come from her, in a way that makes him wish - oh, he wishes -
(Sometimes he dreams of walking into the sea, further out and further out until there is no land, only sky and water, and letting it at last close up over him in salt-brine embrace. He wonders if that was what waited beyond the door of the water-death, the inevitable door in the not-dream where Death told him to choose..)
“That has always been my failure - the things I want. I want everyone whole, everyone safe, everyone happy. I want to walk away for eternity, always over the next hill; I want to stay in Terrastella until I grow roots like a mountain. And whatever I choose it is a betrayal of something or someone else, or of some other part of myself.” He blows out a harsh breath, aware of how petulant it sounds, how self-pitying. It isn’t how he means it; he’s only trying to explain the tension that’s lived inside him since he was a boy, the tide-pull of dreaming and duty.
“I failed you, Marisol. And this is home, it has always been home - which is why I want to learn the rest of Novus. In all my years here I have hardly set foot out of earshot of the sea, I have never seen Viride or the Mors. There is so much I need to understand if I’m ever to…” he trails off like a wave to foam, unsure of what he was going to say. Maybe it was belong, maybe to lead again. In the face of her anguish everything he says only sounds like an excuse; had he thought he could simply explain? Oh, Marisol, the magic island broke Flora’s time-cutting dagger and we were stuck in the place she was born for a family reunion; have you ever seen a world decaying? The moral of the story is still: he left for a year and the world went on without him.
Asterion’s gaze has dropped to the churn of water at his feet. He swallows, clears his throat, lifts his chin to meet her eyes again, and when he forces his voice to be more than a whisper it emerges low and rough, a confession. “I’m too ashamed to face them. I’m afraid they’ll look at me like -”
like you are. He doesn’t say it, doesn’t need to; it’s there in the plaintive lines of his face, the grieving-dark eyes.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” he finishes softly.
@
Asterion.
