.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
03-25-2016, 03:29 PM
One of these days, she would realize that life would always find a way to surprise her - then, perhaps, she would no longer be shocked when her long-dead ghosts returned to life. She was turning on the breeze, listening to the seagulls that never seemed to leave the ocean calling to one another in the chilled air, watching the waves crash along the shoreline below, slowly and carefully chipping away at the landscape -- and then she saw him. Suddenly, she felt very much like the sands of the beach, eroding away beneath what she imagined, from a distance, to be a withering gaze. Why had she ever come this far? Why had she not thought to turn back sooner, to leave him in his peace with his new mate and his new children and his new life, all without her, without the drama and the complications that she always managed to bring to him? But it was too late now, and she was metaphorically falling, brought back suddenly to the first time they had met: she had been flying, much like this, and then she had just tucked her wings, dove for the ground, wondering what would happen if she accidentally forgot to flare her feathered appendages and save herself from the crushing oblivion of death. He had saved her then -- how had she forgotten -- but there would be no saving either of them now, not this time. Not when so much had passed, not when so much of their life was already over, not when she had betrayed him (not on purpose, of course, but even so) time and again. She did not deserve his love, or whatever pieces of himself he had chosen to give her, and yet he had done it anyway. And she had disappeared. For all either of them knew, she might have died. And now she was back from the dead, rising from the cascading waves below to haunt him in his exhaustion. Except that she was real, and he was real, and they were flying toward one another, and it was a dream, it had to be -- there was no reality in which he would greet her with such warmth, or some semblance of it, as though it were only yesterday that she had appeared before him last. She was suddenly glad for the bath she had taken, pleased with her flight along the seashore, hoping that it would mask the smell of the Falls on her. The last thing they needed was an angry Sultan at their doorstep. And she could only assume that he would be angry. "Gaucho," she breathed, a whisper, a prayer, a slight smile worming its way onto her face without her permission. How could she not give him that, when they had shared so much of the life that they had led together? The weight of her actions, so freeing moments before, turned to a cold stone of guilt in her stomach; she could not regret her tryst with Kaj, the birth of Aleta, but oh how she longed for things to go back to being easy. Once, she had been Gaucho's queen - now, she was nothing, no one, not even supposed to be here. She had almost reached him by then, was within a few lengths from him, and without thinking she began to spiral toward the sands, inviting him down with a quick fluttering of her lashes, a flash of a smile, all a memory coming to the surface of the face of a ghost. "Talk talk talk." |
 |
@Gaucho
