The unknown bridged across their heavy, strung silence, and she dreaded every piece of it, every stitch, every thread. It was heady and cumbersome, wicked and clawing, and it stung and labored each breath until she was sure her heart would break apart, and they’d be strangers again, lost to the midst and mist of time and perils. Veils had been lifted and shrouds had been cast aside; no cloaks, no daggers, no armor resting along her chest, no pretenses folded across his features. She waited for a semblance of the truth, for honesty to finally ripple along their chains and leave her with the abrupt, calamitous honesty she’d always known, always realized, but hadn’t heard from his lips (you’re worthless someone once told her, over and over again, and as hard as she’d strived to conquer those fiendish whispers, they still tore and snared). The Songbird shuddered as he pulled away, suddenly feeling bereft, alone, cold, the same speck of dust, of sand, of snow, tossed away on the unfurling breeze – and she was almost too afraid to look him in the eye, to glance his way and find him agreeing with her prior sentiments. She should’ve expected it, being left again, because somehow, someway, she pushed them all into the shadows, into the darkness, into the abyss; where she couldn’t follow, where she couldn’t chase. Her kindness was too demanding, her compassion too overbearing, her heart too overflowing to ever accept the possibility that no one cared for her until it was too late, and they were already gone. It lacerated again, embracing the cold, chilling breeze instead of the radiant, copper glow of his tenderness, of his warmth, of his generosity (but she’d damaged that too, on their journeys, sliding precariously into so many blemishes and fault lines it was a wonder she hadn’t been swallowed by the earth yet). The femme nearly curled away, and would’ve tucked herself into a coiled, withered frame had her own perilous thoughts not distracted and deterred her from fleeing the inevitable. What had she ever done for him? Danced? Laughed? Forged smiles and grins? Wrote sonnets? Spoke about the sun and dragged him into further perils? Followed him when he said he’d wander – despaired when he’d committed those exact actions? Traced and sketched and tried to find him when he didn’t want to be found? Her actions, compiled together in an assemblage of youthful whims and rapturous days, seemed almost meaningless, inept, and ridiculous (no matter how much she enjoyed them). He’d likely humored her, smiled at her antics because she’d been so pitiful, so pathetic, so ineffectual at everything but amusement and denseness, too blind to see the inevitable, too stupid to see what she’d always be, too foolish to ever overcome her faults and flaws. While Imogen blanched and hissed at the reverberating lies, at the collision of all the myths Lena told herself, he finally spoke.
 
The words coursed through her mind at a steady beat: confident and assured, even as his eyes were set with tears and his stare bored into hers. There were no falsehoods labored within the enigmatic rise of blue and misery, anguish and declarations, and she didn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend, the rise and fall of his notions. She opened her mouth, parted her lips once or twice, but failed to make a sound, honeyed, amber gaze merely locked on him and him alone, struggling to dissemble her previous reflections, to know on which line they waltzed. So the seraph said nothing at first, and simply stepped toward him again, taking long inhales, then exhales, matching regality and rapture, reverence and virtue, as she reached for the drops sliding down his cheeks, as her maw softly landed on one and gently brushed it aside. The Mender tread very carefully, soothed and assuaged the tender, raw pieces of their broken, rancorous hours, hummed beneath the quivers in her throat and the benedictions pervading her lungs; she’d forgive him over and over again just to hear such phrases once more.
 
A catharsis, a beginning, a glimmer, of something new, a trembling, fledgling course of the furtive was suddenly lifted – specious fortifications that hadn’t been so deep, that hadn’t been so rough. It wasn’t all cut and dry, it wasn’t all healed, it wasn’t all laced together in a pretty package and delivered with a bow, but it was an understanding, a notion, between two blemished souls. She didn’t intend to make him suffer any longer; her own words had mustered enough blows. Lena was done looking back on a thousand heartaches, done combing over guilty tales. He’d served his penance, and she was not a siren damning him to purgatory.
 
“I don’t deserve anything,” she finally uttered in a strong, stalwart, valorous melody, weaving it along his ears so he couldn’t question its clarity, its might, its strength – tilting her head so he could see the depths of her smile appearing, so she could watch his reaction as more of her hidden convictions, as more of her boldness, of her audacity (because something inside her was bursting, begging, beckoning to be set free) blossomed through the frosted dawn. “I have loved you for a long time,” the Songbird paused, stirring another tune, silken, airy, ethereal, before she could stop herself again, before she could retreat back to the same unrelenting sorrow and melancholy she’d built up around her – she’d throw herself over the ramparts he dared to scale. If he didn’t catch her, it was her own fault that she’d fallen, her own bones to mend, her own soul to heal over once more. “You were my deliverance, my salvation, and I was so lost without you.” She grinned beneath his touch, as he caressed her cheek, as he strived to meld back into what they’d once shared, and she fell into a sort of impish gleam, into a mess of fey instincts. “If you think you can escape me again, you underestimate my abilities.”