we are all just stars
with people names
with people names
P
lease, stay tonight, she wants to tell him and let him fall into her arms again and again and again. Just the press of his side against her side is enough to leave her breathless and wanting more. There is, after all, hardly a moment they are parted, and when they do part she can hardly bare to look, to watch him go step by step away from her again. There is always that looming darkness, that fear that something will happen, that he will just disappear, that this will all have been a dream. It is but a shadow most days, kept at bay by shafts of light shifting in her thoughts, great windows and skylights letting in sunnier thoughts. Like when he came back and stayed with her. Like when he walked with her on the beach before that. Or when they were in a tavern in the middle of the city and he sat and talked with her and made her ache so wholly for him she thought him holy, too.
These things keep her sewn together, keep her from letting rice and cotton stuffing spill from split seams as they would on the dolls she'd played with as a girl when she was lucky enough to have them.
Moira Tonnerre does not ask him to stay tonight.
She watches as Michael rises like the sun, golden, resplendent, impossibly handsome still. He looks to her with that same soft, constant smile. If there is sorrow in it she does not always comment, just tries to heal by staying by him, too. He is a half of her she missed before she ever knew he was a piece that had fallen away. Or perhaps, she'd been a piece of him that had fallen away into a different world and only now are they returned together once more. But she does not want this to be the only once-more that they have. Michael does not see when the young immortal bites her lip as he turns and opens the door. Such an action is swept under the blankets when he looks back a final time, tells her to have a good day, for it will be busy.
The day is long and droll and full of so many things she hardly has time to file them away in the halls of her mind. Great towers of shelves full of mental notes sit, gothic and grim, waiting for another tome to fall on them.
It does. Of course it does as the day winds down.
Moira needs a drink by the end of it.
And instead of going to the little pub she and Michael would frequent, instead the Emissary winds her way through the streets. She smiles like she is not worried, like there is not something awry in their court once more. Her home, shaken. Her home, forever changed. How long must there be a change such as this? Will it never cease.
A great breath falls from her as she opens a door. A quaint, quiet, sweet little door. And inside, Michael is there and he is golden. Her sun, her moon, her sky. He turns, his pale, pale, bone-white hair in some sort of tie or braid to be kept from the tea, and smiles that business smile, that Michael smile when a customer comes in. It lasts only a moment, and that moment makes her pause, makes her watchful, for his smile to change into something that is them. Him. And her.
Moira smiles back like she's seen the sun because she has. He is her light.
"Hello, beastie," she murmurs past the other patrons of his shop. Because he is here and she is his and this is the only face she's longed to see the entire day.
