my hands reach for her, but she cannot be anchored. she belongs to no one, to nothing, to nowhere.
She is a pool of longing and pain, of loss and gain, something old and something new, something entirely unlike the stained glass put in the fire before they'd all left. Now, she needs a sieve to sift through all the minute facets of her emotions, laying them bare under a LED light, tweezing out flaws like glass from a wound that festers, full of puss and poison left too long unattended. Bit by bit they roil beneath the surface of her shattering pond, wishing so desperately to be heard, to be known, to be seen.
But Moira Tonnerre hates being a spectacle.
To be a Tonnerre, to be a woman, to be a child of that family is to be seen, not heard; to be prim and perfect, to present a face to the public that is as cold as ice, harder than bulletproof glass; if there are any faults they are hidden just as all the rabble of the family is swiftly cast aside.
She will not be another casualty of their cold war. Her steps are echoed by his, and he is quick behind her, so close that the heat of golden skin nearly presses into her trembling side - should he touch her again she'd surely shatter. His very nearness is draining and exhilarating, eliciting responses she'd rather bury a hatchet into than let see the light of day. Stiff lipped and bright eyed, Moira marches forward without uttering a peep to the man that is her golden ghost, her nightmare and every dream. Pale hair brushes the tips of her wings and she shivers, casting a glance to Michael that would shatter stone or melt it, but he does not falter.
Steadfast, sturdy, a companion returned with glue guns in hand and ready to pick up the pieces. The phoenix does not ask what battles he's seen, and she does not dare whisper of her own unbecoming. There are secrets they both hide in the crevices of their skin, lying in the hollows of their collarbones, tucked neatly into the pleats of their hair. Some demons only come out when libations are plenty and tongues waggle loose.
Once, she lost that battle with him.
Once, he was hers by the moonlight.
That once is gone.
Moira murmurs briefly to a guard they pass, asking for extra blankets and pillows to be brought up to her room before sweeping into the hallway that will take them to somewhere more private, perhaps too intimate, but she is weary and she is tired and the only other home she knows are the walls of books and shelves of stories that would take her further than Michael could ever dream of going. So she does not go there, does not turn into the well-trod path to the library that would soothe her more quickly than any cup of tea or midnight tale. Instead, she glides through the doors of her chamber, pacing over to the wall to put up curtains and covers over splattered canvases, covering the part of her room that might be more of a disaster than anything she is right now.
Bookshelves line another wall, her bed with its billowing black curtains of gossamer and smoke take up the back center of the room. From there, she rules over her domain with a hawk's eye and iron fist. From there, hidden from the world, she is safe.
Moira does not retreat, she turns to Michael and watches when he places a plate and loaf of bread on the table she reserves for occasional meals that Neerja forces into her and heaps upon heaps of books. With a raised brow, she lets silence be their only conversation.
“Meet me
where the end begins,
in echoes,
where your world is me,
and my world is you.”
They didn't have castles, when Michael was king. They didn't have cities or tall brick walls or cobblestone paths. There are times that Michael feels like a stranger and times when he feels like a con the only unwavering thing is the breathless awe that falls on him like the first snow. Sometimes he thinks he might have liked one: stained glass windows, blue carpet as plush as spring clover, banners that bore his family name.
Sometimes he thinks he deserved the wide grass plain, the field that slopes down toward the beach almost to gently to notice at all, the oak trees and the empty space where his pride should sit. Michael knows he wanted to be king of nothing. Michael knows that the crown was too heavy.
None of that matters, really. It didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now-- all that matters is the breathless awe and the fist around Michael's heart as he follows the emissary through the main hall, up the stairs, through hallways lit by nothing but sparse torches and the star-freckled sky through the windows.
The sky that is turning purple, and pink, at the corners-- a sky that is blushing along with him, when Moira asks for pillows and blankets and the guards nod as discreetly as they can, averting their eyes.
It isn't until Moira opens the door to her room and starts throwing soft curtains over her art--he almost forgot she was a painter, somehow, and he wonders what it's like, to bring something tangible like that into the world, to create something from nothing, to do something consequential, anything consequential--that Michael realizes just how tired he is, baggy eyes and tangles hair and that ache in the back of his throat telling him to sleep.
But how can he?
How can he do anything? Michael looks around while she gathers and hangs fabric, at the smooth walls, at the shielded paintings, at the clink of the floor as she walk and the bed--
Moira stops. Moira stands up straight and leers down her nose at Michael, who has to try not wilt under her gaze. Michael places the plate on the table and scoots it closer to the center so it doesn't fall. He levels some ineffable gaze on her, pulling the scarf from his neck and folding it to keep busy.
Michael struggles-- for something to say, for something to do, for literally anything that breaks the silence. He finally settles on,"Where's Neerja?"
my hands reach for her, but she cannot be anchored. she belongs to no one, to nothing, to nowhere.
He shrinks like she's slapped him when she looks back to him, nearly shaking, holding himself together by mere threads. She wonders what it's like to be on the other side of her stare, and then she remembers the Matriarch with her cool silver eyes and pale hair, her smooth skin tight, her brow perpetually displeased, a frown ever in place on perfect lips. Something about her always made Moira shiver, feeling more unwelcome within the very walls of her childhood than Denocte ever made her feel. Has she become like her great grandmother after all? Cold blooded, beautiful, untouchable?
Sadness is like an oil spill over the water, hiding everything beneath, shielding her, spreading. It is hard to contain, even harder to hold back. Her own brow furrows like an inchworm, her shoulders drooping as she shakes her head.
This is not who she is.
Moira is not involved. Is she?
"She got tired of my moping," the Emissary replies, sticking her tongue out at the door, sending that image to her beloved tigress and feeling a disgruntled huff in return. That almost draws a smile onto her weary lips, almost but not quite. When she moves again, it is to push Michael closer to the cushioned bed, maneuvering him next to it and then abandoning him just as he left her so many moons ago. Circling around to the other side, she settles onto the mass of it, pulling soft blankets over her shoulders, draping the many colors of them hidden under a larger quilt until it looks more like some strange circus tent than a girl's bed.
Looking to him once she's safely tucked behind her shields, she asks "Why have you come back? Truly?" And she begs for honesty with her golden eyes, pleads to his own pale blue gaze for a sliver of the truth, for a grain to swallow that would fill the void that only grows and gnaws at her as any starving beast does when left untended too long.
She hates not knowing, not when she's so invested in something, not when she cares as she seems to now. Something that is hers left, something sadder returned and she wants to know why. Here, where she cannot run, she seeks the truth at last.
"Speech"
v | n | @Michael | "here get in my bed but don't touch me" lol
“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.”
Michael wants, desperately, to touch her.
Not in some unwholesome way, not as if she is a prey animal and he is a wolf with hungry teeth, but Michael wants to touch her. He wants to smooth the hair back from her brow. He wants to press his lips to her cheek, her jaw, her ear. He is looking at her, so tired and so angry and so unbelievably sad, and he is thinking that there are few things he wants to do more than he wants to lay her down and promise tomorrow over and over, every day, until there is no more tomorrow to go into.
And Michael doesn't say this because Michael doesn't know he feels it until she is answering his question. It is just that one second he is folding his scarf, laying on her table next to the lonely plate, and the next he looks up as she's speaking and he is it so hard with the sensation that it makes him dizzy.
"I wouldn't call it moping." he says, when she's finished. "It's okay to be hurt when people have hurt you. There's no shame in that."
He doesn't say I'm so sorry I've hurt you because she must be tired of it, can only hear him beg for forgiveness so many times before it loses its meaning--and he thinks that, now, if he did any single thing that took the edge off just how sorry he is, for hurting her, for leaving her, and for coming back, crawling on his knees, asking her to want him like he wants her, that he would not know what to do.
Moira comes close, and Michael holds his breath. Moira shoves Michael toward the bed and he starts to fill with a blend of panic and confusion that does not go away when she sweeps toward the other side and tucks herself in. Michael is his again with the feeling, the deep-set ache of dear god, Moira, why that is starting to become familiar. It is a comfortable, if desperate, ache-- and when she looks up at him, wrapped in the soft, black sheet of her blanket, so incredibly tired and so endlessly guarded, it is almost all Michael can do to stay on his feet.
Why did you come back, truly? she asks, and in spite of himself Michael is tired, too. "If you must know," he begins, before sinking to his knees where he stands and leaning his head on the side of her bed, one cheek on a pillow of tangled white hair. He looks at her for a little too long, a little too kindly.
If Neerja is gone, what has Moira been doing? If Neerja is gone, just how sad has she been? The good-ache mixes with the bad-ache and everything in Michael tangles at once, making red and black knots where the should be the cool blue of the ocean. He sighs. It is not nearly as grim of a sigh as he feels.
"Something felt wrong. I mean, something usually feels wrong--I've been alive a long time and for most of that I've had the same feeling--but Isra asked me to go and I didn't want to go because you're here and--" Michael pauses for a moment, collects himself, and continues: "I looked at Isra and I was just incredibly worried for no reason and the only thing that made sense was... coming back. To you."
He tucks one side of his mouth in a smile, looking up at her from the mess of his hair against the dark shape of her bed. "I don't know. The only thing that makes sense is you."
my hands reach for her, but she cannot be anchored. she belongs to no one, to nothing, to nowhere.
He is nervous and he is afraid, and she thinks he ought to be, but then so is she. Her heart beats more fiercely than any war drums ever have, her eyes wide for a moment then shallow and closed, shuttering and sharp. Words are blades to pierce him, wound him, undo him as he undoes her over and over. Tucked beneath her blankets before her mouth purses, gaze snapping back to his just as she snaps "Does that make it okay to mourn them like they are gone? Does that make it okay to abandon home and reason and become more a beast than Neerja can ever be? Does that make it okay-" she cuts herself off with a growl. Frustration bleeds back into her face, and she is quick to douse it with guilt, with a plea for forgiveness.
Moira knows she is not the only one wronged, Moira knows she is a mule to be so mean. More than that, Moira knows that her bonded feels these wounds so deeply that she can only hope to repair them with time."Save those sorry eyes for Neerja, she has been hurt worst of all." It is spit out at the pillows, her own golden gaze falling down, down, down to etch his hair into patterns until she's certain that she could recreate every strand upon a canvas with her eyes closed. There is another, she knows, that she could paint ever shadow of his face without having to look at him. No amount of time that passes will change that, for he held her heart first, he held her hand first. Even Estelle would be hard pressed to wash those memories from her heart and drown them in the salt of the sea.
No, not even Estelle could save her from herself.
Some things, she knows, will never truly disappear. Not even death could take him from her mind. Then, there is Michael - golden and glorious in his cloud of pale hair, his soft, sad smile, his lifetime after lifetime after lifetime of experiences... He draws her in until she is a moon orbiting his sun. Even Moira cannot shine as brightly as Michael, not even with all the light pulled from the sky and held between her hands, offered only to him, always to him...
Biting her lips, she shakes her head. Pools find the corners of her eyes like diamonds, precious gems held there stubbornly until they disappear or fall. God how she hopes they won't fall. Instead, the shattered girl (the tattered girl), licks her lips and whispers "I missed Asterion and he left without a goodbye. I missed Bexley Briar and her white curls and her golden smile and she left without a goodbye. I missed Isra, my dear heart, and she left without a goodbye. I missed you and you left without a goodbye..." These are the ones who hold her heart on a string. One after another, dancing by, disappearing into dusk, into dawn, into the dead of night... All that was left when they did was her. Alone. Abandoned again.
She could have run, but the prude girl could no more run from Denocte and Novus as she could Neerja. Some bonds are too strong to be broken.
Mulishly she frowns, nostrils flaring wide as she snorts at him "Just because something makes sense does not mean it always happens. I once thought a great many things made sense..." Although the words start strong, start fierce as any lioness' would, they end soft, end quietly, end pensive and sad.
Why must she always end sad?
"Michael, I think you make sense, too." Her confession leaves her with a puckered brow, with only the barest curl of her lips. She holds her breath, holds on to him, and refuses to look away. If he should leave now, at least she will have this moment. The jungle she professed her love to another man in is so far away, but it, too, is fresh in her mind. After a moment like this, Asterion disappeared.
Is this her curse? For everyone she learns to love, yearns to love, to disappear when she says it aloud? So be it, she will bare it all for them. For them, she would die a million deaths and come again with a smile and another ocean welling with demons of her own demise, demons of her own making.
very time he sees her is the first time: calling their country to heel in Isra's absence, wreathed in the red light of the setting sun, powerful and heartbroken and volatile. This image is always there in the back of his mind, a phoenix wearing the sun like a cloak, glowing like hot coals.
She had not seen him then-- deliberately missed him, if he remembers correctly. He had not quite cared then. Denocte was not his home. She was not his home. Isra and her city still were not his home.
He thinks, now, with his cheek on her pillow and the warm of her close enough to make him dizzy, that if she looks at him and then looks away, ever, he will break and break and break until there is no more of the world left to hold his pieces.
Michael's heart stutters inside him. He loves her. Desperately. Hopelessly. With no care in the world how cliche it may sound or just how much it will hurt-- him, them, everyone caught in the crossfire. Love is war, he thinks, because he feels torn like a battlefield, barren and rutted and black.
"You can mourn anything." he says. "People. Places. Concepts. Anything."
He is mourning things, now: himself, though he lives; himself, though he dies, over and over, to see her so hurt. Himself because in a week or two weeks he will find Isra and she will tell him the same: that he left, that Michael leaves things, floats away when his chest gets to tight. That Michael leads sailors to their doom like a siren and, as they're swallowing seawater in some dark, forgotten cave-- he leaves.
He wants to be better than this. He wants so badly to be anything but what he is. He wants to vanish into the woods and never come back, walk the earth until it forgets his name again-- be alone, and alone, and alone, where there is only himself to hurt. There is only himself to abandon.
But Michael is no longer immortal. He has but this one, frighteningly short life left to ruin.
"I'm so sorry," he whispers, because she does not want to hear him explain, does not want to hear him comfort. Michael listens, intently. Michael watches the lines of her face draw in and stick: the crease of her brow, an unbecoming frown that's so much like a snarl he thinks of Neerja, somewhere else, hurting too. He waits and he listens and when she says you make sense like an echo he does not have to be told how to smile or when.
"You look like you're expecting me to walk out the door." he says, leaning more heavily on his bottom cheek, so that his neck aches to be twisting. "How could I?"
How could he? He loves her. Desperately. Hopelessly.
I am soft again.
There is water and it surrounds me.
There is feeling and I can feel it.
“I have mourned so much," she confides in him, all doe-eyes and sorrow. There is no self-pity though, only tumultuous, thorough reflection on a past poorly lived, on a past barely survived after day upon day of trying to hold on to a sinking boat and nearly drowning as it went down. She knows the horrors of herself, embraced them thoroughly while he was away, and still she wonders if those abysmal planes stretch on further or simply grow when she sees the white of his hair and the blue of his eyes again. Michael is easily the softest, most lovely and beautiful thing she has ever known.
He is the swell of the sea at night, the curve of the moon when it kisses her eyelids, oh he is her prayers even when she doesn't know that she's praying.
Tonight, he is her secret, he is her diary. Tonight, he is only hers and she refuses to let him leave now that he's placed himself beside her. Again and again she will wrap her rope around the bow of a ship, tie her fate to a boy that could let her drown or save her, she will have that courage, she decides, and the tenacity to always keep swimming back up for air to find them again and again no matter how large the swell of the sea nor how hungry she grows for something more than food. Sweet ancestors help her, she chooses him still, would hold him still were she not busy being petulant and hurt and childish. All she needs is a moment of his time to mourn, to throw her fit, to let him know, truly know what it was to be destroyed by a thousand needles tearing through her flesh every day he was not there.
Golden eyes trace his golden skin, try to see through to the man underneath with secrets more vast than the ocean he so easily pulls her to time after time. When her chest collapses in a great upheaval of air leaving, his words still fresh, still ringing in her teardrop ears, she purses her lips but does not know how to look away. Beneath that blue, blue, stunning blue gaze she has forgotten a great many things, she'd tell you if she remembered anyone but him in those few moments it takes to collect herself. “Won't you?" she asks simply, the statement twisting her gut.
Even as she's saying it she knows she should not, the proper thing to do would be to accept this, accept him as her family would like her to do save for the fact that Michael is most definitely not Tonnerre. In every other aspect, he is divine, he is perfect. But she cannot tell him this, cannot, cannot, cannot...why not? “Time will take everything, and Michael, I'm so scared that you're my whole world." She says this against the roundness of his golden cheek, lips brushing up and over to his ear before she pulls back, kissing both eyelids and his nose so softly they could be the touch of a butterfly's wings. How could she tell him that and expect herself not to break apart when he leaves again?
So she resolves herself to shattering on the rocks of his absence, hardens herself to a fate that would happen with time. Immortality has little place for love in the long run, but she doesn't have to tell him that. Not yet. Not now.
e was her, once: stumbling blindly, using only the eyes on his heart and not the ones in his head. Everything is rose colored when all there is to see is your own blood, pumping. Everything else is music when all you can hear is your own voice, bouncing around on the walls of your chest.
He was her, once: scar tissue too thick to keep breaking the skin, all leather and steel instead of cool spring water and soft summer grass. He loved a girl like him, with soft white hair and ocean eyes. He loved a girl who leaves, who was petty and jealous and short-tempered and so incredibly, impossibly broken that he could not even hold out hope that he'd find all her pieces, let alone put them together.
Michael tells himself that he will not be like her.
Won't you? Moira asks, less of a question and more of a plea. Michael shakes his head just as well as he can, leaned against the bed. It squeaks quietly when he moves, and the blankets bunch up at his chin, but he can't see any of it because he is looking at her, and her, and her, until time spins away to its end.
Won't you, Moira asks, and Michael wonders how to say 'no' in a way she'll believe. He loves her. He loves her. He loves her. "If you send me away," he says, smiling, "otherwise no."
Time is a funny thing. It goes so slow until it is moving too fast. One moment he is following her to her room, watching guards look at him with either pity or vague awe or confusion-- then before he's ready the night gets so incredibly late and he gets so incredibly tired, blinking heavy-lidded at her from her side.
Time will take everything, as she says. Time will take him, sooner rather than later in the grand scheme of things. She does not say this but she means it. Michael tries not to miss his old self. Michael tries not to wish for a few extra decades to spend watching her become what she will. He is still smiling when she finishes.
"I'm not," Michael says, "I promise I'm not."
He blinks back a yawn. "No one is. You don't need me-- but I'm thankful that you want me."
She kisses him, kisses his cheek, his eyelids, his forehead, and he looks at her like a drowning man come to the surface-- breathless.
I am soft again.
There is water and it surrounds me.
There is feeling and I can feel it.
They are raw and they are aching and they are beautiful. Broken things always are. Like shattered glass or diamond rings. Facets will always reflect the light and cast a rainbow. Facets will always be dusted in shadow. Facets will always cut you if you press too hard. They are shattered windows and Moira only wants to lift the blinds higher and higher, tearing them from the frame until Michael is the only sun that she knows, but she is afraid.
There is a beast and it raises its head in her belly.
It strings a noose about her heart, pressing a handle into her palm, letting her push or pull. No matter which she chooses, Moira knows she loses.
His eyes are the blue of her sorrow as they alight on her skin. Even as he does not, they reach for her and hold her close. More closely than they have in such a long time. She wants to sigh into them, to lose herself in the galaxy of their sadness and longing. At least there she would know that he cannot leave her lest he wish himself blind.
That, too, is a possibility though. It leers toothily at her, glinting as a razor pressed as butterfly wings to her flesh. Blankets cocoon her, convincing her that there is a modicum of safety left even though she’s invited the wolf into her room. Beneath them, she sweats. It is not from heat or nearness to him or the furious pounding of her own blood. No. No.
Her sweat tastes of fear born from a future that could be, from everything she has yet to lose.
Moira Tonnerre, unlike her proud house, is so used to losing and losing. She has learned to sacrifice her own happiness on a pyre of bones and watch others become nothing but stardust racing toward another’s galaxy. Selfishly, she wants Michael to stay in her own. Isn’t that why he is here now, choosing to lie beside her even though she could smother him if he dared fall asleep and none would be the wiser?
She bites her lip, watching his move as he talks. Can she truly trust that? Should she?
Part of her is a kitten mewling, keening, crying. Part of her is running.
What part does she listen to?
“You are,” she breathes between kisses. “You are my sun and you are so tired. We both are. I see it.” The phoenix runs her phantom hands along the wings of his shoulder blades, massages along his spine until he is supple and pliant in her grasp. “Rest. Rest and be there when I wake up. I pray you are not just a dream.”
And she doesn’t dare reach out to bite him again. Hardly allowing herself time to think through those words, Moira decidedly closes her eyes and wills herself into stillness, into a murky darkness that does not easily take her under.
