i tell you, will remember

[crossfortune]

Name: Mischa
Story: N/A: one-shot (probably)
Colors: white opal (pictures in the clouds), dove grey (and he will make the face of heav'n so fine), octarine (No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. )
Supplies and Styles: N/A
Word Count: 498
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: death, and a lot of it.
Summary: Two lovers, a battlefield, and how everything ends.
Notes: I have no idea what I was doing with this. Title comes from Sappho, the particular poem fragment that goes Someone, in another time, I tell you, will remember us. The protagonist's name is never mentioned, but her name is Althaia.


Please, I whisper, through voiceless throat, please, and I crawl, across the bloody ground. Blood and bodies and armor pieces, beneath the shattered sky of heaven: none of us will ever be buried, corpses lying for the ravens as we wander through the far shore of the underworld, lost and lamenting, but it doesn’t matter, now. All I have is this one hope: I dreamed, once, of following you to your immortal glory, o daughter of the goddess of the sea, of living forever by your side, but-

All that is far away, now, distant as the tide and the sun: once I danced beneath sky and at the shore, but now I am reduced to this crawling creature with only one hope left. Please. Please.

(I told you about the secret of my blood, my thoughts spin in circles, The secret that kings and gods killed us for-)

I followed you, Aoide, because I loved you. I loved you from the moment I saw you, dancing beneath the moon, even though I was jealous. Jealous because I was tall and dark and nut-brown, like the warrior women from beyond the circles of the world, and you were small and pale and delicate, a princess with a living father and a mother who had come back to see you, where all my family was dead, I-

(You smiled at me, that first time. You smiled at everyone, faraway and distant, but you smiled at me, looked at me, eyes like the moon, and I was lost-)

I want to see you again, one last time. Please don’t go. Please. I find you, lying there, your foes dead around and around and around you, shattered sword and your pale hair matted with blood. You’re still alive, though, still alive, and I press my wrist to your lips, offer you my lifeblood.

“Please, drink,” I beg, because there’s no chance for me to live, but my only hope now is for you to live on.

You press your lips together and refuse to drink, no matter how much I beg. Please. Please. Please.

No.

“Not without you,” you say, at last, and smile, catching my fingers in yours, just before your grip goes slack, your eyes going dim and turning to colorless glass.

(Was this the only way it could have ended? Even the gods are bound by fate. Your mother was given to a mortal because the Lord of Heaven feared that her child would be greater than their father. You spent your childhood sewing and dancing, never laid a hand on a weapon, because you were meant to die young and beautiful and always remembered, and your mother hadn’t wanted you to die.

But fate cannot be altered, and-)

Above us, the sky falls in, and all is dark: I turn my eyes away, and curl across your body, as if I could protect you just this once, and close my eyes, to wait until the morning comes.

Comments

[novel_machinist]

This was really sad, desperate, and beautiful.

[shipwreck_light]

This is so hopelessly romantic, so full of joy and despair and images. I remain in awe of how you get so much into such little spaces of words. But, you always do and it's amazing.

Thank you.

[kay_brooke]

Gorgeous, and so sad. I love how much emotion is packed into such a small space.

[bookblather]

oh god my heart

It doesn't help that I heard the bit about Aoide's mother and immediately started drawing parallels with Achilles and Patroclus and my heart, Mischa.