“I have mourned so much," she confides in him, all doe-eyes and sorrow. There is no self-pity though, only tumultuous, thorough reflection on a past poorly lived, on a past barely survived after day upon day of trying to hold on to a sinking boat and nearly drowning as it went down. She knows the horrors of herself, embraced them thoroughly while he was away, and still she wonders if those abysmal planes stretch on further or simply grow when she sees the white of his hair and the blue of his eyes again. Michael is easily the softest, most lovely and beautiful thing she has ever known.
He is the swell of the sea at night, the curve of the moon when it kisses her eyelids, oh he is her prayers even when she doesn't know that she's praying.
Tonight, he is her secret, he is her diary. Tonight, he is only hers and she refuses to let him leave now that he's placed himself beside her. Again and again she will wrap her rope around the bow of a ship, tie her fate to a boy that could let her drown or save her, she will have that courage, she decides, and the tenacity to always keep swimming back up for air to find them again and again no matter how large the swell of the sea nor how hungry she grows for something more than food. Sweet ancestors help her, she chooses him still, would hold him still were she not busy being petulant and hurt and childish. All she needs is a moment of his time to mourn, to throw her fit, to let him know, truly know what it was to be destroyed by a thousand needles tearing through her flesh every day he was not there.
Golden eyes trace his golden skin, try to see through to the man underneath with secrets more vast than the ocean he so easily pulls her to time after time. When her chest collapses in a great upheaval of air leaving, his words still fresh, still ringing in her teardrop ears, she purses her lips but does not know how to look away. Beneath that blue, blue, stunning blue gaze she has forgotten a great many things, she'd tell you if she remembered anyone but him in those few moments it takes to collect herself. “Won't you?" she asks simply, the statement twisting her gut.
Even as she's saying it she knows she should not, the proper thing to do would be to accept this, accept him as her family would like her to do save for the fact that Michael is most definitely not Tonnerre. In every other aspect, he is divine, he is perfect. But she cannot tell him this, cannot, cannot, cannot...why not? “Time will take everything, and Michael, I'm so scared that you're my whole world." She says this against the roundness of his golden cheek, lips brushing up and over to his ear before she pulls back, kissing both eyelids and his nose so softly they could be the touch of a butterfly's wings. How could she tell him that and expect herself not to break apart when he leaves again?
So she resolves herself to shattering on the rocks of his absence, hardens herself to a fate that would happen with time. Immortality has little place for love in the long run, but she doesn't have to tell him that. Not yet. Not now.
“speech” @Michael