and again and again and rise
If she was the storm, he was the ground that prayed for rain.
He can feel it in the way his skin comes alive beneath her touch, like he has only ever lived a half-life before her. Each press of her lips, each graze of her teeth and he can feel the lightning in her, and his blood roars like it wants nothing more than to be the thunder chasing after her. Maybe he has always been chasing after her; and maybe that is why the ache rising in him to match her’s feels so familiar.
And he knows he should fear it (storms like her’s were as likely to tear down trees like him as they were to water them). But the look she gives him in the river is another knife, crawling beneath his skin and through the muscle. Only this one, this one reaches his heart and there it sinks like the sun, pulling him down, down, down with her.
It makes him forget the violence and the dead man laying somewhere in the woods behind him, and all the skeletons lying in unmarked graves crying out for peace. Her touch makes the what if’s and the fears and the worries fluttering like torn off butterfly wings through his mind crumble into dust, and buries all the things he will never understand beneath a mountain of ash.
Because this —
This —
This is a language he has always recognized.
The curl of her tail around his hock is a language he never thought he would know but oh, he knows. This is the language the earth uses: the way a tree speaks through its leaves, its trunk, its roots; the many miles a flower travels in small, finite dances every hour of every day, never speaking, but endlessly conversing with the sun and the wind and water and all the flowers surrounding it.
And her body, her teeth against his skin, it all speaks to him in the same primordial way. It speaks in hunger and anger and sadness and joy — and the space between their bodies is a part of it. Life and death, wilting and falling, rooting and blooming. He doesn’t know who is leading who but oh, it has never mattered to him.
And in the lines she draws across his skin, Ipomoea finds all the words he’ll ever need.
He paints flowers on her shoulders, flowers that say make a home of me and grow roots in me, painted in patterns instead of words. He presses his fever-hot skin against her winter storm until he can’t tell the difference between them anymore, and that is still not enough. Not when their skin still separates them.
”Is this death then?”
He has always known what she was. And he has always loved the wildest parts of her, the parts that could make him forget he was born instead of made, that made him want to set his own fiercely-beating heart free so that it could run beside her’s.
The magic is still bleeding out of him but no longer is it growing thorns and nooses and poppies. The forest has stopped raging, and weeping, and feasting over spilt blood, and (for the moment) so has he. His magic is blooming like a flower that has never seen rain before today, and all the forest blooms with it. The trees don’t whisper to him of death, or lean away from the algae growing in the water - how could they when everything in him is leaning towards her, and commanding they do the same?
”Or is this the art you were looking for?” he presses the words into her skin with his teeth like a prayer. Even when he thinks there might be just as much winter in him as spring now, still he drags his lips down her spine and swallows more salt and dust and black-tainted water down. Something primitive rises in him at the taste.
And all the while his body is saying don’t stop, don’t ever stop and he — he is not sure if it is a command or a plea.
He can feel it in the way his skin comes alive beneath her touch, like he has only ever lived a half-life before her. Each press of her lips, each graze of her teeth and he can feel the lightning in her, and his blood roars like it wants nothing more than to be the thunder chasing after her. Maybe he has always been chasing after her; and maybe that is why the ache rising in him to match her’s feels so familiar.
And he knows he should fear it (storms like her’s were as likely to tear down trees like him as they were to water them). But the look she gives him in the river is another knife, crawling beneath his skin and through the muscle. Only this one, this one reaches his heart and there it sinks like the sun, pulling him down, down, down with her.
It makes him forget the violence and the dead man laying somewhere in the woods behind him, and all the skeletons lying in unmarked graves crying out for peace. Her touch makes the what if’s and the fears and the worries fluttering like torn off butterfly wings through his mind crumble into dust, and buries all the things he will never understand beneath a mountain of ash.
Because this —
This —
This is a language he has always recognized.
The curl of her tail around his hock is a language he never thought he would know but oh, he knows. This is the language the earth uses: the way a tree speaks through its leaves, its trunk, its roots; the many miles a flower travels in small, finite dances every hour of every day, never speaking, but endlessly conversing with the sun and the wind and water and all the flowers surrounding it.
And her body, her teeth against his skin, it all speaks to him in the same primordial way. It speaks in hunger and anger and sadness and joy — and the space between their bodies is a part of it. Life and death, wilting and falling, rooting and blooming. He doesn’t know who is leading who but oh, it has never mattered to him.
And in the lines she draws across his skin, Ipomoea finds all the words he’ll ever need.
He paints flowers on her shoulders, flowers that say make a home of me and grow roots in me, painted in patterns instead of words. He presses his fever-hot skin against her winter storm until he can’t tell the difference between them anymore, and that is still not enough. Not when their skin still separates them.
”Is this death then?”
He has always known what she was. And he has always loved the wildest parts of her, the parts that could make him forget he was born instead of made, that made him want to set his own fiercely-beating heart free so that it could run beside her’s.
The magic is still bleeding out of him but no longer is it growing thorns and nooses and poppies. The forest has stopped raging, and weeping, and feasting over spilt blood, and (for the moment) so has he. His magic is blooming like a flower that has never seen rain before today, and all the forest blooms with it. The trees don’t whisper to him of death, or lean away from the algae growing in the water - how could they when everything in him is leaning towards her, and commanding they do the same?
”Or is this the art you were looking for?” he presses the words into her skin with his teeth like a prayer. Even when he thinks there might be just as much winter in him as spring now, still he drags his lips down her spine and swallows more salt and dust and black-tainted water down. Something primitive rises in him at the taste.
And all the while his body is saying don’t stop, don’t ever stop and he — he is not sure if it is a command or a plea.
@thana ! <3
”here am i!“
