[P] nostalgia for the familiar

[Marisol]

someone will remember us
i say
even in another time

Nothing has ever been so terrifying as the existence of her children.

It is not the brief, cold fear that flashes through her on the battlefield. That one is bright, acrid, soaked in adrenaline—tipped on a spearpoint like poison. It is not the dull, gnawing anxiety of being ruler, the one that sits in her stomach day after day after day as she weighs the options, sated only by the faces of her people safe at their festivals and in their homes. It is not even the cement block that pulls at her legs when she thinks about death and drags her into the riptides.

It is all of these and worse. Infinitely.

Marisol cannot sleep, cannot breathe, cannot eat. The world is haunted now: around every corner there is something new to live in fear of, and every shadow in the castle is filled with some monster that might tear them apart if she is not there, watching, ready to fight. The very few moments that Gunhilde and Aeneas are out of her sight are enough to send her spiraling. It is a kind of paranoia she has never felt before, and the worst part is that it is righteous. This is not something, like so many of her other problems, that she can ignore with logic.

So when she pokes her head into the kids’ room and sees Aeneas’ bed, the sheets rumpled and empty, it is pure dread that floods her and roots her to the floor. For a moment she is frozen, her panic a living, volatile thing that squeezes her like a victim of Medusa until her heart stops and her lungs threaten to collapse.

Marisol closes the door, as quietly as she can manage while shaking, and steps back.

Once the door closes and she’s shut into the hallway, her trembling grows intense and violent; heat floods over her, then a wave of bitter cold; and finally she remembers to turn her head, though only when her vision has already begun to grow black, and sees his flickering cosmic light at the end of the hall. And the relief that washes over her is god-given.

"Aeneas." Her voice might be trembling; if anyone knows Mari's weaknesses it will be her children, and so she has already almost given up on hiding them. She comes up behind him, steps silenced by the plush carpets, and presses her mouth against his angel-small shoulder.

He smells like home.

And outside, the snow keeps tumbling down.

“Speaking.”

credits