“A dream in my chest is molting. My dream sheds its muddy, thunder-stained skin and asks for a heart of peony field this time.”
The street becomes a thin sheet of cloudy white stone turned a soft pink by the setting sun. Isra is coming, he thinks. Isra rolls out her glittering carpet and comes to Michael and does not drown him or run him through, just smiles like a dying star and touches him so softly he barely feels it at all
So many things are gone, now. Finished. He wants to say ruined but he knows this is a path he will tread til the strings of time have spun themselves down to nothing. Michael looks at her quartz path and thinks that he will never love gems, or fine metals, because they will always be hers. Michael thinks back to a time on the beach when the world was just dandelion seeds and round gray rocks and things seemed simple, and easy, and drawing breath was not a laborious act.
'It breaks my heart' Isra says and Michael sucks in a ragged breath, somewhere between a sob so quietly it can barely be said to have happened at all and a measured, careful inhalation. Businesslike. Proper.
It breaks my heart Isra says but Michael thinks that he is the one that's cracking, breaking over and over again until the thread of time has spun itself down to nothing. Damn fate, Michael thinks. Damn time, altogether. Damn everything that is not him and his one shining thing that doesn't hurt when the rest of the world feels like its made of broken glass that he must crawl over on his hands and knees.
"I could never." he says, though he is uncommonly still-- because she must know he couldn't. Isra can't pretend not to have seen Michael, staring out at the ocean wishing for-- anything? Wishing for Moira, wishing for happiness, wishing for some form of Isra that does not burn to the touch.
And she cant pretend to have missed him, when they docked, and Michael looked at her, at her black, righteous fury, and Michael knew that they would not have her for long. She is a god now, he thinks, even as she rests against him and feels whole, and real, and soft. She is a god and her hunger for justice is just as loud as her rage and the Isra-that-was is not the same Isra-that-is.
So he ran.
He ran far. He ran fast. She had watched him go.
She had watched him.
"I haven't," he says, "I haven't been back long, myself. A month or two, I think."
When he closes his eyes and tries to breathe through his teeth (a soft hiss that sounds like sand through an hourglass) Michael thinks that he knows, now, what it is to die, over and over, for someone, and to keep doing it-- because you want to, because you must, because it is the only thing to do.
When he opens them, Michael looks at Isra--divine, broken, heartbreaking Isra--and frowns. "How are you? Are you okay? What can I do?" Now that he is on solid ground. Now that there is not just some boards and his bright, cold fear between him and the bottomless sea.
@isra <3
