and again and again and rise
The world around them feels like it is starting to spin, as the river pulls them down, down, down into the water and he wraps his neck around Thana like she is the only thing stopping him from floating away. All that he is is coming apart, all his roots and his petals and the bits of sand and blood rusted around his heart falling away like so many leaves in winter, until all that’s left is his paper-birch-thin skin. The water is choke-full of algae and lily pads now, black spots creeping around their edges and lotus flowers blooming in spite of it, like the river wants nothing more than to become a garden alongside them, no matter how twisted or rotten.
There has always been a garden growing inside of him, even when it was nothing more than seeds taking root in a desert that knew only how to grow spines and bones.
And he made his garden grow its roots through sand and stone, collected flowers and vines to plant in it, taught them how to survive in a place they did not know. He had never stopped to ask if they wanted that pain, of growing in such a hard place. He had only promised them it would be worth it, that the beauty of it, in the end, would right any wrongs he made.
Once he might have been ashamed to call this river a garden.
But now he wonders how he ever thought a rose had more value than a roseum, or that a rose ceased to be a rose once its petals began to dry.
How could he think there was only one way to grow a garden?
Her name is a sigh on his lips when he presses in closer, and closer, until his wounds touch her’s and he begins to wonder how his skin hasn’t turned the same ruby-red color. “Thana,” he whispers, because he doesn’t know how to say anything else, not when the only language he wants to know tonight is the kind they write across each other’s bodies. “Thana,” he says again with her mane tangling in his teeth, and all the things he does not know how to say (not with words, not in this language of their’s that speaks in teeth drawn down skin and blood rushing through the water) are there in his voice, in the way he runs his lips down her spine as it bends beneath his kiss.
I need you, he says in the space (is there any space left?) between them, and I am your’s.
This is what she does to him: instead of death, she makes the magic in his veins start to burn, and his heart starts to feel like a starving man, and oh, oh, oh —
It feels like love, like hunger —
and it hurts.
But her skin has stopped looking like blood and begun tasting like wine, skin he can’t get enough of, skin that is intoxicating. And even when they’re surrounded by the river he is drinking in only her, he is drowning in only her.
And when she begs of him, please, his answer is a moan that sounds as much like the music he does not know how to make.
“Yes.”
And then like a wolf (like that beast beneath his skin that is begging, and howling, and sobbing at the moon) he takes that nameless ache rushing through the both of them and he pulls her down,
Down,
Down into the river.
There has always been a garden growing inside of him, even when it was nothing more than seeds taking root in a desert that knew only how to grow spines and bones.
And he made his garden grow its roots through sand and stone, collected flowers and vines to plant in it, taught them how to survive in a place they did not know. He had never stopped to ask if they wanted that pain, of growing in such a hard place. He had only promised them it would be worth it, that the beauty of it, in the end, would right any wrongs he made.
Once he might have been ashamed to call this river a garden.
But now he wonders how he ever thought a rose had more value than a roseum, or that a rose ceased to be a rose once its petals began to dry.
How could he think there was only one way to grow a garden?
Her name is a sigh on his lips when he presses in closer, and closer, until his wounds touch her’s and he begins to wonder how his skin hasn’t turned the same ruby-red color. “Thana,” he whispers, because he doesn’t know how to say anything else, not when the only language he wants to know tonight is the kind they write across each other’s bodies. “Thana,” he says again with her mane tangling in his teeth, and all the things he does not know how to say (not with words, not in this language of their’s that speaks in teeth drawn down skin and blood rushing through the water) are there in his voice, in the way he runs his lips down her spine as it bends beneath his kiss.
I need you, he says in the space (is there any space left?) between them, and I am your’s.
This is what she does to him: instead of death, she makes the magic in his veins start to burn, and his heart starts to feel like a starving man, and oh, oh, oh —
It feels like love, like hunger —
and it hurts.
But her skin has stopped looking like blood and begun tasting like wine, skin he can’t get enough of, skin that is intoxicating. And even when they’re surrounded by the river he is drinking in only her, he is drowning in only her.
And when she begs of him, please, his answer is a moan that sounds as much like the music he does not know how to make.
“Yes.”
And then like a wolf (like that beast beneath his skin that is begging, and howling, and sobbing at the moon) he takes that nameless ache rushing through the both of them and he pulls her down,
Down,
Down into the river.
@thana ! <3
”here am i!“
