E
very time he sees her is the first time: calling their country to heel in Isra's absence, wreathed in the red light of the setting sun, powerful and heartbroken and volatile. This image is always there in the back of his mind, a phoenix wearing the sun like a cloak, glowing like hot coals.She had not seen him then-- deliberately missed him, if he remembers correctly. He had not quite cared then. Denocte was not his home. She was not his home. Isra and her city still were not his home.
He thinks, now, with his cheek on her pillow and the warm of her close enough to make him dizzy, that if she looks at him and then looks away, ever, he will break and break and break until there is no more of the world left to hold his pieces.
Michael's heart stutters inside him. He loves her. Desperately. Hopelessly. With no care in the world how cliche it may sound or just how much it will hurt-- him, them, everyone caught in the crossfire. Love is war, he thinks, because he feels torn like a battlefield, barren and rutted and black.
"You can mourn anything." he says. "People. Places. Concepts. Anything."
He is mourning things, now: himself, though he lives; himself, though he dies, over and over, to see her so hurt. Himself because in a week or two weeks he will find Isra and she will tell him the same: that he left, that Michael leaves things, floats away when his chest gets to tight. That Michael leads sailors to their doom like a siren and, as they're swallowing seawater in some dark, forgotten cave-- he leaves.
He wants to be better than this. He wants so badly to be anything but what he is. He wants to vanish into the woods and never come back, walk the earth until it forgets his name again-- be alone, and alone, and alone, where there is only himself to hurt. There is only himself to abandon.
But Michael is no longer immortal. He has but this one, frighteningly short life left to ruin.
"I'm so sorry," he whispers, because she does not want to hear him explain, does not want to hear him comfort. Michael listens, intently. Michael watches the lines of her face draw in and stick: the crease of her brow, an unbecoming frown that's so much like a snarl he thinks of Neerja, somewhere else, hurting too. He waits and he listens and when she says you make sense like an echo he does not have to be told how to smile or when.
"You look like you're expecting me to walk out the door." he says, leaning more heavily on his bottom cheek, so that his neck aches to be twisting. "How could I?"
How could he? He loves her. Desperately. Hopelessly.
I am soft again.
There is water and it surrounds me.
There is feeling and I can feel it.
There is water and it surrounds me.
There is feeling and I can feel it.
@
