[P] nostalgia for the familiar

[Marisol]

someone will remember us
i say
even in another time

Sometimes, Marisol thinks—the world is incredible.

What a life this is. She remembers being hungry. She remembers being an angry, starving child: more bones than flesh, more pain than compassion. Constant fighting. Not just against her wild-eyed mother or the stony Commander but against herself, against the girl in the mirror who wanted to and would never go home. And the leery glances of the other cadets whether she was pinning them to the ground or daring to take a well-earned break.

She remembers there was a time when the sky sang to her more often than the sea did. There was a time, not so long ago, when she could not even imagine what it felt like to drown. Is she better, now, for knowing?

She remembers there was a time, even more recently, where Marisol was convinced she would not, could not, ever exist outside the scope of her duties. Commander. Then Sovereign. There was a time when love was a foreign thing, a far-off storybook ideal; there was a time when the idea of having children, a child, even, was untenable.

But looking at him, Marisol cannot seem to recall any of these times. There is only here. And now. Here and now, with the cold room growing warm, and the snow still flurrying outside, and the lights dim and warm as coals.  And in this soft not-darkness, the boy she made, so perfectly, delicately built that it aches just to look at him: the too-clean snip, the clouds of thick white hair. More than anything, her memory evades her when she looks into his eyes—soft, and gray, and innocent.

Marisol sinks down beside him. The stony floor is cold—she almost flinches—but there is a fire blazing in the wall, and warmth seeps into the Commander’s body as she pulls Aeneas into her side, tucking him carefully under one spotted wing.

“That’s okay,” she mumbles into his hair. It’s not, but he doesn’t have to know that; he will have his fair share of pain, Marisol is sure, once he leaves her. Why kickstart the process? She continues: “It looks like a painting, doesn’t it? If de Clare had painted this—what do you think he would call it?”


“Speaking.”

credits