'all the flakes of me fell not like snow but like ash and they drifted through the breeze like stones'
“Not anyone.” She says and looks behind him to a tattered banner cracking in the winter winds that no walls could keep out. It flutters like a page half torn out of some legend, soaked with tears and worn enough from empty wishes that the words have long since run and faded and tangled into nothing more than a black pool of what could be oil.
The banner reminds her of all the wounds she's stitched together through the past nights. She thinks of all the children who dreamed the drugged dreams of flowers and worlds made of moonlight where nothing knew how to die and only lived, lived, lived.
And when she looks back at him her sadness feels like an ocean of misunderstanding between the two of them. She draws her nose back to her chest when he offers nothing more than a smile that turns dark. Isra wonders if it might feel like touching an electric eel who only wants to guard all the coral reefs from hunting, hungry sharks. “And there are fewer still who would have done all that you have, who could have.”She thinks that her words or her smiles have never had the power to burn and inspire the way that dark, fearsome look of his might.
“Oh Raymond,” The words sound like a sigh, old and ancient and darker than any sound a unicorn should know how to make. “don't you know that you are so very, very far from being anyone?” Surely he knows, she thinks, no one can carry a fire and a fury quite like the devil can.
Isra know she's too full of salt and sorrow and sea-water to ever burn and smolder in quite the right way. She's made for misting beneath the sun and washing away the soot and bone littered on the shoreline. Her bones are made from dreaming and hoping, healing and drowning.
It feels like the horizon when she steps closer to him-- fire to sea, solar flare to falling star, blood to brine. She feels hot in that space around him and the winter feels so very, very far away when she can taste both the ocean and the iron of his battle wounds.
“Will you help me?” And despite the heat of him and the coldness of all her sadness the words bloom between them like an impossible full moon that even the sun cannot dream of drowning in the horizon.
@Raymond
