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His voice sounds like thunder in her bones. Electricity replaces marrow. Storm-clouds replace sinew. She shivers at the feeling, her flesh nothing more than bits and pieces of the before, of the now, of the bottom of the sea, stitched together pretending to be something else. The look on her face waivers between sorrow and something deeper, something darker, something as euphoric as death.
It feels like her heart is leaking starlight and decay while she traces the line of his gaze up, up, up, towards that gnarled wide-jawed cloud.
There is a need in her own gaze when she looks back to this mortal coil and traces the line of his cheek, his shoulder, his spine running beside her like a horizon she's only just learned to sail. “Of course.” And the way she traces the lines of his rib, waiting like slumbering lions, promises that she knows too the pull of it-- of the want, of the need, of the furious embers banked against their organs instead of blood.
Hunger is the only thing she knows well now-- hunger and sorrow, entropy and winter-frost.
She leans a shoulder towards him, the starving lion in her own skin purring almost-silent at his. This time she does not look back at the sky, instead she watches the map of his form (of soot-black and bone-white) like it has all the shapes she has forgotten the color of. Like it's the promise of rain she's been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for.
When she blinks she can still feel the salt of the sea crystallized on her eyelashes. She had thought it winter, but it's not. It's always the sea.
Her lips ache to wipe away the blood from his eye like the crusted red is only tears and sorrow leaking from a wound she cannot heal for him. The ground sinks below her hooves as she steps close enough that the lines of her sleeping-lion-ribs might fill the spaces between his.
“I'm just a girl.” She says, tracing the edge of his mane with the shadow of her muzzle (an almost touch that she does not know how to stop). And perhaps that is the reason she is so like what instead of a who--
Surely it is only this ache in her belly reaching out to the world and begging, begging, for something to fill it. If only for a moment.
“Who are you?” She's hungry, and wanting, and her lips are still aching with the need to wipe the blood from his face. This time there is no smile to fill the hush, hush, hush. Instead there is the thunder roar of her heart as it learns to beat, and echo, and mimic the sound of his voice in her bones.
* * * * *
nothing can breathe in this space
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