Michael and Moira sit at the table as the red, red sun finally sinks below the horizon. They are smiling at each other. Their demons are smiling at each other. And for a moment, when Michael laughs like a leaky mug, Moira leans over the railing and looks into the deep, dark pit of him and sees--what? He does not even remember. Michael worries he will have to reel her in, put his shaking hands on her chest and pull her back from the edge before it swallows her like it has swallowed him.
She lean back on her own and, inwardly, Michael lets out a breath he had not meant to hold.
He is not all poison - there are beautiful things in Michael, like the sun and the sand and the sea, and possibly they are larger than all that black - but sadness has a way of compounding when it is touched by another.
He is not surprised to see the ghost of old fear float across her face - it is there in his own wide eyes, his racing heart, a smile that is so gentle it is almost not there at all. When the last threads of light die out across the space between them they are both pale-faced in the blue of the night, now lit only by the string of lights lining the room. She does not look powerful now, does not look like a phoenix risen from her own ashes with the vengeful fury of any other lore-beast. She does not look like the Moira that stood before their Court in a wreath of sunlight with all of Denocte on her sturdy back.
She does not look like any of these things. She looks like Moira, worried and breathless, so scared of Michael and his soft voice and his laugh like apple cider. It is like a fist around his heart and he has to remember to breathe.
At first he doesn't answer her, just watches, head tilted just enough to study her properly, expression schooled into something other than the fist around his heart or the way he is screaming please in his head over and over, until it has stopped being a word altogether, just a sound, just a hymn in the dark of the bar and the far-off rumbled of the other patrons. He does not want her to drown. He is not to be drowned in. He does not know how to keep her afloat, either.
She ducks under his nose, and Michael can smell the perfume of her hair, more delicate than he had expected, somehow, and not at all like the ash and glowing coals of the rest of her. He prays for--something--with closed eyes. Strength. Guidance. He doesn't know. Michael breathes in the essence of her, all her sadness and fear and shackles, and he exhales through his nose in one long breath.
He lifts his own chin from her head, and then Moira's, and their eyes meet, fire on ocean. "You are not vulnerable."
He stares at her for as long as it takes the bartender to cross the floor, lay another drink at the edge of the table, and walk away, huffing. He is searching her--her face, her eyes, her mouth, her dark and impossible hair. His telekineses is still holding her, too gently, as if he is scared she might break in his grip. She is not vulnerable. She could never be. He begs, "What do you have to confess?"
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
drowning never felt so much like flying as it does right now
Jasmine and winter, lonely temples and sea-spice, and something very distant, something from her first home, are the only things to perfume her, to romance him, to ease Michael closer. They are twining branches, twisting around another and pulled apart in a violent wind storm, forever to dance side by side, forever growing the same way, yet they are never quite the same. Reassurances fall as sea-water from pink lips, and they are not enough to assuage the knowledge that lays in its grave within. The entertainer's words leave ash on her tongue, leave eyes glistening, so much so that the phoenix looks away.
She is but a pile of ashes and embers.
Softly glowing.
Gently burning.
Something quiet now, waiting.
Always does the Tonnerre girl wait. Soon, all her life will be the past and she will still be waiting for the future. Nothing matters, it does not matter as someone sets another glass upon their table. All she sees is the white of his lashes and blue of his eyes, the cream of his skin as it shimmers under flickering lights. Baubles held aloft reflect that light back to him, and her head tilts curiously.
They stare, a round of questions always echoing in the caverns yawning between them, an infinite loop as two serpents twisting and twisting and twisting. His threads are tangled with her threads and Isra's threads and the tapestry as it is sewn into something bigger. Why, why, why does it always beat back to the waters? The heartbeat of the world is not the sky, not the earth, but the sea. She wishes she could answer him honestly with courage, with a sparkle in her eye and a smile on her mouth. For the first time, Moira wants to unspool herself from the sewing machine, unhook herself from the needles. Could she, she would be a threadbare rug, tattered with her words before him, with everything hung on the strings of her heart.
She cannot.
The Emissary cannot. The phoenix cannot. The Tonnerre in her cannot.
With his gentle hands holding her as a ghost, with his soft eyes imploring, with his begging lips, he is an angel and she not even a demon enough to tempt and tamper with him. She is dust. She is ash. She is nothing.
"Everything," as though she is a lie. As though she is a sinner. As though she is a saint. Moira's voice is low and sweet, scratchy, husky as it licks at Michael's ears. Her eyes blaze and burn, begging that he understand she cannot. Imploring he does not make her say everything of her becoming and undoing. Because she would. Great ancestors above, Moira Tonnerre would tell him then with her belly still tingling and warm, with butterflies dancing in clouds within her head. All of it would be his to revel in, spoils of a war they cannot help but to lose in the end. "What are you doing to me?" she asks, barely a whisper into the corner of his mouth.
The music is quiet, crooning. Michael can see the string lights in her eyes, small as the star-freckled sky and just as dark. The murmur of other patrons has become almost comfortable now: this is it, this moment that separates them, a moment on the precipice. He holds her so gently, like he's afraid, though he isn't.
Michael knows now that there is no fear on earth that could grip him any tighter than he lets it.
Isra is not all monsters and gods. Sometimes she is still an aspiration. Sometimes.
Moira turns her eyes down, under lashes that bat like a wing, and Michael lets her go, as he has let many things go before her. Letting go is as easy as opening the hand and tipping it -- all the sand falls out in wet clumps or streams, with only a stray grain or two that sticks to the palm, the fingers. He lets her go like a bottled letter, green-glassed and waiting.
He lets her go like he had let everything else go: with little more than a hitched breath, not a second thought. This is simply the way of things. It always has been. It always will be.
What do you want, Michael?
This, he thinks. It isn't so hard to draw new lines on a map. It isn't so hard to point yourself toward a new star, a brighter star. She takes stock of his suffering and does not see that not everyone is owned by their trauma or drowned in the blood of their hemmorhaging heart. When she is looking away he takes just a moment to be very sad, in a way that he recognizes but can't quite name, in a way that is as familiar to him as his own skin.
And still, at the end of the day, nothing is lost.
Michael lifts that same strand of hair off her forehead and rests his lips on the space left behind. He closes his eyes. He breathes slow: in, out.
What are you doing to me? She asks. He wants to say it. He wants to say it so bad it hurts.
Instead, Michael says, "Pushing you, a little too far, I think." before kissing the space between her eyes as gently as he can before. He leans back, smiling like the sun. It is genuine, and kind, and loving. Perhaps it says more than he ever could. Michael picks up the drink left behind on the table, grimaces as it burns its way down his throat, then smiles, again.
"You can tell me when you're ready. Do you want to go home?"
He wishes he could say it in a way that doesn't sound like old ships, or breaking waves. He wishes he could say it like it wasn't an apology. He can't.
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
drowning never felt so much like flying as it does right now
Warmth upon her brow, a gentle caress in their little darkened corner now, only starlight a witness to the tender touch of lips upon her forehead. Does he hear the way her heart strains towards him, its harpsichord muscles plucking themselves raw until they are broken and bloody and waiting to try again and again and again? Can he hear the sigh of her chest as she leans forward, leans in so close that they might never come unglued from this moment or this spot?
She doubts it even though she wishes she does not.
For a perfect moment she lets herself melt. How the phoenix is so good at melting now, melting into boys with pretty words and pretty eyes, melting into people like a candle dying, melting until she is but a puddle left to freeze over and reform into something different, something new. Oh, but how she softens for him and listens to his words, listens to the shallowness of her own panicked breaths, listens and wishes he would talk forever and a day.
Moira could get lose in his words, in the highs and the lows and the softness of it all. Michael is much like a kitten, a kitten too gentle for her, too sweet, and too lovely to let go of.
At last he withdraws, and sweet ancestors, he is radiant. Almost, it is almost painful for the phoenix to look upon the man of sun and starlight, to drink in all of his gold and his grandeur. But she looks because she knows it will be something that will stay with her for eternity. She looks even if it will blind her to everything else. She looks because she cannot look anywhere else but him, or the curve of his mouth, or the love in his eyes, or the tip of his ears.
She looks at him just as he looks at her: naked and completely undone.
"I wish to go to the ocean," she says at last, straightening herself and delicately clearing her throat. Dished head withdraws, pesky hairs flop back into disarray, and the crystal still safely hides within her hair. "I wish to walk over the black pearls and taste the salt and see the docks. I don't want to go home," she says, when really she means I don't want to leave you yet. "Will you come with me, Michael?" And she extends that hand again, the same one offered in such a different way outside a maze that their Queen razed to the ground.
Now she waits for him as she did not then, with bated breath and a quiet hope that keeps on burning; defiant through every storm that splinters all of her ships into reefs and coasts until there is only the hope of rebuilding left in the end.
“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
When his lips touch her forehad it shocks him how badly he aches, bone-deep and ragged, as if he is coming apart altogether.
If Michael cares at all about queens or gods or their countries he has forgotten it. If he cares about anything at all that is not himself and Moira and the night he touched her face like he knew her, it does not matter now. Growth often does not happen all at once -- sometimes it takes root in the dead of fall and hits a person behind their teeth like a fist on the precipice of winter.
He is trying not to look hopeful when she raises her eyes again--by which I mean is he trying not to look at her at all, just grimacing around the sting of alcohol in his throat, praying that this is the one that does him in, blurs him until he has become a comfortable fog in his own body. Everything is too sharp and too bright (especially her) and he thinks he will die if his tolerance does not let its hold on him slip.
Of course, he may actually die if he sees her in any softer light, either--the way it glances off her cheekbone and the lids of her eyes, but that's altogether another problem.
I want to go to the ocean, she says into the sudden hush of the tavern, full of the scent of mulled cider and wine. He is still trying not to look hopeful when she continues, the same smoky voice he has heard all night but with an undercurrent of desperation that rolls around in his stomach with his own. He is trying so hard not to look hopeful that he stares, for a moment, the blue of his eyes so dark in the tangle of his mane.
And then a smile breaks across his face like a flood, pooling in every corner. "Of course," he says. It does not feel as heavy and when he promises Isra yes, yes, anything you ask, yes. It does not feel as heavy as Denocte holding its breath. IT feels as soft as the light on her eyelids and the skin his lips had touched.
He aches. He aches so bad he feels it in his throat, a lump he has to swallow around.
The door swings open before Mihchael, who stretches one leg out to catch it before it closes again. "Whatever you ask of me."
drowning never felt so much like flying as it does right now
He looks and he does not, he flirts with only his eyes so dark and blue, he begs with his skin against her skin and never having uttered a word. Michael is tearing the phoenix apart brick by brick, garden walls tumbling down as vines creep through and flowers blossom. Ancestors help her, she's trying so hard to look away, but can't look anywhere but at him, like a helpless lamb ready to be led to slaughter, like a girl and a boy in soft flickering candlelight with the buzz of laughter and joy in the background, like she isn't doomed eternally to be a wonderer who never knows a true home. But she falls anyway, she stares and stares and stares.
Moira's magic begs to push away the hair from his eyes, to unveil the bright blue stars that she wants to look only at her. It is a knot in her chest, it siphons her will away bit by bit, and when he smiles. Sweet mother have mercy, when he smiles like that she's undone.
The phoenix looks away then, gossamer lashes at last hiding near glowing amber eyes, the freckles on her face too bright, her skin too hot, everything too loud and too quiet and never enough. It's never enough. But that smile is. There aren't butterflies in her stomach then, but a whole flock of riotous birds crowing and screaming to whatever thing will listen. So she rises, she rises tall and proud and shy; aching and excited and unsure; a breathless thing on the edge of another cliff, another cycle bound to repeat itself, and yet so ready to spread her wings at last - to learn to fly again and again and again. She will burn through the chains that bind her, she will melt the iron pointed at her throat, she will change the stars and make her own galaxies of wonder if she must.
When she passes Michael, she begs, "Don't look at me like that," and it is hoarse and note entirely what she means at all. "Don't look at me like you've found salvation." And she thinks that she is only a shooting star, something destined to fall as a meteorite and crash, burning, broken, in some strange world where everything will hurt. Moira cannot tell him this, not when the crisp air forces her nearer to him, sharing his body heat and offering her own to ward off the chill. Not when they head towards the sea that Isra loves and hates so much, that she yearns to walk along to remember another boy in another time, that she wants to make new and beautiful memories alongside Michael with tonight.
The ocean, she's found, is becoming a place for newness, for growth. It gives and it takes and it never asks if it should or if it could. It simply does as it will. Moira thinks that a lovely and selfish thing, but is drawn back to it all the same over and over.
“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
The almost-winter air blows in from the hills and it takes its hands on his face for Michael to feel how everything spins, like he is falling and falling and falling but never quite hits the ground.
This is enough. It's easy to be no more than someone that holds the door open and nods as she passes. It's easy to touch her shoulder with his and beg the powers that be to either end his suffering or tell him it will be forever--that here at the end of all things, when Michael's clock is finally ticking and each second seems somehow more precious than the last, this will be the sweet and slow death he deserves.
Moira says don't like she's lying, don't look at me like I'm your salvation, and Michael laughs because he's pretty sure he's in hell. If she is a star burning down to dust in his sky then he wishes on each sparkling piece of her to crash where he wants. He wishes, he wishes, he wishes--
--he wishes many things, and this is the one that has come to be. It is colder than he realized, the sort of cold that sits on the skin but dissolves in the blood (possible because they are more alcohol than horse at this point, but, semantics), the sort of cold that he sees when he closes his eyes, all white light and blank space. The sort of cold at the bottom of the sea where he creaks like old ships and prays to blue serpents.
Michael regards her as they walk, curious how something like this happens. Who is he, in the grand scheme of things? Who is he to walk to the sea with a girl made of fire and pain? He does not stop to ask if he will, if deserving or not deserving makes any difference.
It was never a question, really.
Michael unwraps his scarf, an iridescent blue in the silver wash of the moon, and slings it across Moira's shoulders, tucking each end under the other, smoothing the tassels in place like an artisan. He smiles. His neck is cold where it hung.
"I'm not in the business of lying." he says, like it's as simple as that, and they walk -- to the ocean, and its glittering surface, and all the dark, dark things beneath.
@Moira
Um here is this closer finally WOW I am sorry for the wait
ON TO MORE MIMO
