I
t goes like this: Michael follows Moira like a shadow, or less than that. A bright spot on the horizon. Something always humming and warm in a world often cold, and unfeeling, and cruel, even at the best of times. He says little, just smiles when she looks at him over her shoulder, and tips his head to the side when she asks how he is, what he wants, how he's doing.It has now been years since he was drained of his immortality. He can feel himself aging. He promises to stay, over and over again Michael promises that he will stay with her, no matter the cost. She does not ask him why there's a "cost" to begin with, why he cannot just feel free because he is free, why he has to have it trembling in his fists to see that it is alive at all.
He doesn't know how he's doing. He doesn't want to know. None of it matters.
Today Michael feels old, though nine years (give or take a few hundred) isn't all that bad, really, in the grand scheme of things. He didn't know it would hurt, that he would be so full of old, familiar aches that they settle back to a dull thrum in the back of his head when he's not actively taking stock of them. He supposes, it's hard not to feel old, sometimes.
(Moira is as young and as beautiful as she's ever been. He looks at her before he leaves her side for the day, meandering toward the market with a loaf of bread and a heavy feeling in all four of his legs-- and he thinks, now, maybe more than ever, that he had never wanted to be mortal at all. He'd stay for her. He'd stay forever, for her.)
Michael stops by the fountain, gold and white and blue against its white stone as he sinks onto the wide rim and the loaf cracks in half in his grip with a soft, satisfying crunch. Near him, there is a girl, not quite waifish but delicate in the bones, a dizzying smear of white and every soft, pale color he can think of. He is not prone, these days, to caring much about strangers. Even now his chest squeezes itself in a vice when he holds out half the loaf and gives her a wobbling smile.
He wonders if it will ever not be nerve-wracking, speaking. He hopes.
"This is too much for just me," he says, "we can share, if you'd like."
I am soft again.
There is water and it surrounds me.
There is feeling and I can feel it.
There is water and it surrounds me.
There is feeling and I can feel it.
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