[P] the violence in the pouring rain

[Theodosia]

let our eyes show the
fire in our hearts tonight

When she goes looking, she finds Marisol on the cliffs, and she can’t say that she is surprised. For a moment, she says nothing as they stand there beneath the fading streaks of light, and she considers the Commander with pale eyes as she turns over the events of the meeting in her mind.

“The ocean swallowed you, and you fought it.” It isn’t a question -- she had seen Marisol come exploding out of the waves like a cannonball, had seen the salt crusted along her wings -- and she knows that the ocean is a ravenous creature, that it would swallow down any foolish enough to test their own limits, and that it would come back for more if it could.

Sometimes she has thought about throwing herself to the crashing waves, when the weight of the world has crushed her down flat, when it feels as though her shoulders are too narrow for all the troubles that she has carried. She had thought there would be glory in the title of Champion -- but instead she finds only duty, only disappointment, only the constant pressing thought of failure and the fear that bites at her heels whenever she stops moving long enough to breathe.

“Why?” Perhaps she is asking why Marisol had fallen into the waves in the first place -- perhaps she is asking how the commander had found a reason to resist instead, how the weight of duty hadn’t dragged her down to become bones on the ocean floor.

Even she isn’t sure which, exactly, she is asking, and she turns her gaze away from the commander, towards the hungry sea.

“Are you okay?”

She doesn’t think that Marisol will answer her honestly, and the thought makes her stomach twist, a sour taste in the back of her mouth.

credits
@Marisol