[P] all that's left is a ghost of you

[Renwick]

renwick

—
« To anyone who’s ever stolen a piece of my poor heart »

H

ow he longs to tell her that he would do so again in a heart beat, if she only dared to voice it. To write her letters accompanied by seasonal flowers. Pale moon roses carefully blended with desert fire blooms, the colours of her eyes and her hair. He had such a romantics heart then, and truthfully, it lingers faithfully. Painfully. A mournful shade in an overgrown thicket, leaving invisible groves at the very edge of the boundry path. Unable to go forth and cannot go back. Tormented by it.

A slow waltz of respair on withering rose petals and black feathers.

Now there's a space between them, made more poignant by the cavernous expanse they now occupy. Renwick has sin stones like the rest of them, though his by far seem graver the more he thinks upon them. Heavier. The romantic in him has grown cruel, where he himself is the singular subject. There's no need to be gracious with oneselves when it comes to self-inflicted injuries. Simply apply caustic salve to the open wound and close ragged claws around tight. Until it weeps that terrible awful shade of green and sickly yellow, makes the strong pallid and the weak perish.

Would it satisfy the pieces of her, if she knew he felt. Would it ever be enough?

They have aged, surely as the seasons wax and wane, the very same way the moon gentles herself before returning to her resplendance. He looks at her, an oasis in a long desert. His former thoughts run a thousand miles an hour and ignite. Again and again, they replay. Turn the same old words over, he's no poet, but he is a lover, and they supposedly have a talent for words far beyond the ordinary pensmith.

She has aged far more gracefully than he ever could, on further observation, decides that she has not at all, and a semblance of relief blossoms there, in the core of him surrounded by gnarled bark roots rotting gold. Even with dark circles about her sun and moon eyes, one emphasised by the addition of gold swipes. She's still beautiful, and it's an old familiar ache. Celestial bodies had knocked their grinning arrow with intention the first time, as the Fates had crowded curiously closer. To rend a man so utterly low for the highest of highs, glass claws broken and chipped while they work across tender flesh.

He's no longer the boy with flowers in his hair and a tourney heart, or maybe he still is exactly how he used to be, but there's no varnish and rose tinted glasses of better tomorrows and happy endings. But she too, has changed, even if his eyes urge him to the contrary, along with the violent constricting in his lungs.

How has he been?

Terrible, sick for things he can and cannot comprehend. Guilt riddled as atoners taking the long walk, hooves chipped and eyes glazed with penitent poison. More often than not, his mind turns back to those unforgiving desert dunes, all those skeletal collared faces skittering across them. When he's present, his mind his an errant flicker of thoughts. A murder of crows, a man who is placed in an awkward point of painful growth. Maturing now into stone and gilt, bleeding out into the ground to make it one and the same.

Renwick wants to ask her instead, of all the things she has seen and done since last they met. Since the letters dried up and the flowers pressed between pages became brittle, frail things. She has new company now, and his gaze briefly turns toward the vulture-like creature in the darkest points of this intimate tableau. Wonders how she came to possess it, because it is hers, he imagines. Unless it is a creature with a penchant for soul watching, ravenous for the trials and tribulations of the mortal kind. In which case, he supposes, that it will have it's fill tonight. A fine pound of flesh, two for one.

She's polite, and genuine, and somehow it hurts all the more. Digs an artful dagger between his ribs and presses sweetly against where he lives. Reminds him of that one specific sinstone wrapped around his neck, heavier still in her presence. The thickly corded braid wrapped around his neck, weighted against the ostentatious collar. The moonstones there reflect the firelight, turn it pale in their homage.

"Better." He settles on. Testing how the word tastes on his tongue. Hoping that it conveys something that is both genuine and tired. He's sure if he returned the question, that he would receive a similar response. Weary and weighted. Seraphina isn't looking to talk about herself, and he knows better than to press. He's in no position to negotiate such a conversation — all that matters is that for one joyous moment their paths have crossed again.

Renwick is a fool who will take scraps for what they are and call it a banquet.

I'm sorry sits at the edge of his tongue, but he swallows it at the last moment. Turns his gaze upward, cranes his neck to emphasise the motion before he returns to watching her. Warm, repentent and fond. Wary and haunted.

"What are you doing so far down here?"

« r » | @Seraphina