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Blackened clouds rolled across a vast sky; it was becoming difficult to pinpoint the sun. To tell, therefore, the time of day. Lunafreya had left early that morning. Now, she was outrunning those encroaching clouds, as though the gloomy hand of Titan hovered above her, eager to strike. To smack that palm down like crushing a bug.
She slapped the reins harder against the neck of her steed. The chocobo’s clawed feet beat against the moistening earth, up-kicked clods of dirt and tufts of grass, their stains coated her riding boots. Splatter of muck across her cheek, this sharp slice.
The rain was picking up. From a tentative patter to this harshness like static on an empty radio channel. She knew that sound. When one got too far from the city it was all pure static. Too far from humanity. Higher up the mountains, nearer to the Gods, and it made for greater meditation, for greater contemplation, so the texts said: the shedding of earthly desires.
It was so lonely.
Water seeped into her riding gear, chilling the skin beneath leather gloves and a fitted jacket. The scent of stirring greenery, of worms slithering above the mud. Disturbed earth. She was so familiar with that smell, the ground upturned by the shovel of an undertaker as Lunafreya uttered the funeral rites in her holy voices.
It was death that she smelt, strangely enough. Amongst all the shuddering, rolling life. And when she was little, she had played in such earth, such life, clamouring on her hands and knees into the hollowed belly of a glorious oak tree. Twigs in her hair, and dirt staining a white dress, and little Noctis at her heels.
“This is my secret place,” she had said. And Noctis’s eyes widened. “You have to promise not to tell anyone.”
He nodded eagerly: “I do,” he said. “I promise!”
“No, that won’t do. You have to pinkie swear it.” How their little fingers linked together.
Now, such earth made her stomach churn.
Pressing onward, it wasn’t long before the manor rose from its foggy shroud. Beckoned her home. Rickety and ancient, this decrepit body of grey stone, slanting from the moors of Tenebrae. Surrounded by trees, they thickened the nearer Lunafreya got, and this ferocious gust of wind had them rattle their limbs at her. Rattle their leaves, this great applause for the return of the Queen.
For the return of the Oracle. The princess. Not-quite-wife. Something.
Someone was returning.
A body which housed a woman, if just barely, was returning.
Guiding her chocobo to the stable, everything was just as it had been so many years ago. Remembering how she had cupped Noctis’s small foot in her hands to hoist him up to the saddled back of his own chocobo. He only just reached the footholds when standing. Stared at them with pouted lips and puffed up, chubby little cheeks, as though they existed just to mock him. She had hidden her giggle behind her hands, then, but now she smiled.
Letting her chocobo shelter there from the rain, she unlatched her satchel to an abundance of greens, placed them into a pail inside the stable. Stroked the feathered neck of her chocobo, how it whinnied beneath her touch. Closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath of cold air, before she went inside the manor.
Lunafreya knew these halls well but did not know this quiet. Could not fathom the droplets plopping down one by one from her hem onto the carpet. Her own smart footsteps tapping their tune onto the dusty floors when carpet ended and began again.
And that? A cough. Her own cough, in fact, as the parched air crept down her throat and into her lungs. Creak of the floorboards, the fumbling of a house which had forgotten it was a house and was trying to right itself. To startle itself awake, We have guests!
A chill ran through her body: the kiss of Shiva. Except that there was no Shiva, not any longer, she had no lips for kissing. No kisses to give.
It was just a saying from before. From older times, ancient times now, it seemed. Shiva’s kiss against the collarbone, or the neck where it lay exposed, where one’s scarf had come undone. Or perhaps, Shiva’s fingers strumming along the spine. But she bore no fingers now, no slow clawing nails.
Lunafreya felt anachronistic when she thought it, that phrase, never mind when she said it aloud as she did sometimes. Met with tired smiles and tired nods. Even people who said, “What’s that?” because twelve years turned memory to mush, and she almost envied them their ignorance.
Feeling rude dripping on the carpet, she made her way upstairs to the master bedroom. Stripped herself to white underwear, and untied her ponytail, unfurling the sopping wet of her blonde hair. It trailed down her back, to her waist, so outgrown. Towel dried it, and left her clothing hooked about the edge of the bathtub in the en-suite.
Outside, a crow cried.
Inside, the room was deep and dark as is the Lucian interior fashion. Or as it was, before. Just as the rest of the house was. Like stepping into an open mouth, all gluttonous reds, and deathly blacks, which made the room chokingly tight.
Picture frames hung on the walls: naked skulls and rotting fruit, and a photograph of Noctis in his boyhood, which to Lunafreya simply meant Noctis. He held a fat frog in his little fat hands, hoisted it toward the camera. Grinned sweetly with both his front teeth missing.
A large closet, and Lunafreya rummaged through it seeking something to wear, seeking a warmth. Unearthed this billowing white dress, puffy sleeved with a high buttoned neck of shiny satin buttons. The fabric beneath like fog itself, skirts loose and flowy.
She knew it belonged to Noctis’s mother, once long ago. Just as this entire manor did. Although Lunafreya had never had the chance to meet her, having only taken trips here with Noctis after his mother’s passing. This was her summer home, away from the glitz and glare of Lucis.
Lunafreya would have killed to be in Lucis, then.
No – not Lucis. But the Lucis of old. Before the fall of everything. Those once flashing lights, the flash of a camera, and the revving of fast cars, their purr. Music thumping, and the shrieks of laughter. Nightlife, the rooftop parties. Her silver dresses. Glasses clinking, champagne shimmering, loud.
Anything that was not quiet. That was not the vacancy between her own ears. The nothingness heavy on her tongue. Silence, where once Gods had screamed her name. It was too easy to think in all this quiet.
Too easy to do anything with all this free time. She had left that morning after toast and tea for breakfast, and no one had batted an eye. One person may have queried where she was headed, yes, the stable hand: “How long will you be away?” they had asked. “Make sure to take enough food for Sweet Creature.”
She unhooked the dress from its hanger and stepped inside it. Buttoned the neck about her throat, tight as fingers. Chin raised slightly to accommodate the stiffness.
Beyond the manor, a crash of thunder. Glorious Titan. Slap of lightning, and it was Ramuh’s wrath erupting jagged from his staff. Lunafreya trembled, clutched at the frills of her dress’s bodice, sought her chest. The rapid beat of her heart.
Ran to the window and flicked the latch, opening it to this magnificent breath of wind. It stampeded through her hair, whipping the curtains and the layers of that dress, this whiteness swelled about her. She tossed herself halfway out the window, bent against the ledge to stare at the cold, secluded sky.
No Gods. Only nature, big and wide as a God herself.
And Lunafreya struggled to get the window closed against those winds and their aggressive pull. But she managed, smacked it shut with a bang. Sighed with a relief she felt deep inside her.
The Gods had been gone for two years now. Which meant Noctis had been gone for longer. Led to the slaughter by her own hand of light. By her own sense of duty, her flaming heart.
When she had rose from the waters she had died in, petals clung as leeches to her skin. She had picked them off, one by one: He loves me, he loves me not…
Barefoot, she slipped back down the stairs, seeking a fireplace that she knew to be at the back of the manor, praying that she would find kindling there. But praying to who, exactly? She avoided touching the banister, not wanting to stir its film of dust.
Portraits lined the walls, former kings and queens seated austere, draped in black and gold: Lucian colours. Glowered down at her collectively, these solemn giants, and it was as though the walls of a tomb encompassed her then, rose tall about her. She had seen many tombs in her short lifetime, had breathed in dead air. Tasted it on her lips.
But she could not be afraid of them, because in their faces she saw Noctis. Sharp blue eyes, and the set of his jaw at twenty-years-old, as she had seen him in magazines, or in photographs he had sent to her. Often, he was not the focus of the photograph, rather the fish was, or Prompto was, or the sunrise was.
Saw him as she had seen him only vaguely in person (as in he was both vague to her visually, as was the fact that it was ‘in person’), submerged in water and blinded by tears and this flurry of petals and his thrashing limbs, the whirlpool he created.
Water pressing forward, the waves lulled against her skin, the water that he touched was touching her, almost as though he was touching her.
He had wept like a baby, child that he was. Face contorted, he had always been a messy crier, and it had only made her more fond of him. How she dabbed at his cheek when they were little, with her embroidered handkerchief, “My silly little prince. Crying over silly little things.”
Following that trail of portraits, she reached a familiar face: King Regis. The creases in his skin, the pain etched there. They looked at each other in a conversation of regret, or guilt.
Beside him, an empty frame, awaiting to be filled by the next king. It would never be filled. A space in the line of Lucis, but that line had been snipped by the sharpened scissors of fate.
Lunafreya had held the scissors herself. Or sharpened them. Or had pulled them from the flesh of her own body, still coated in the thick of her intestines, and plunged them into Noctis’s jugular. Watched him choke on his own blood. Life drained from his eyes.
And if Noctis had been there right then, he would have said, “Thank fuck.”
Would have said how much he hated sitting still for a portrait. Would have thanked her for offing him, with a grin on his cheeks. He had told her as much in a letter once.
The twiddling of impatient thumbs, thumb war with himself, and his knee bobbed up and down. Gritting his teeth to stifle a smirk at the thought of something funny Prompto had said to him earlier that day. The way his father’s stern gaze only made him want to laugh more.
“My leg’s stiffening up,” he said, with a shrug. Excused himself. Found an empty room in the citadel to play a round or two of King’s Knight, and Lunafreya had laughed when she read about it.
Her mischievous boy.
At the end of the hallway, the Noctis of her childhood, she saw him then. Doubled over and giggling to himself. His voice high and his arm clamped about his stomach. A cast on that arm, the words she herself had scrawled there in blue marker: 'GET WELL SOON. LOVE LUNA.'
Oh, the sweet kiss she had pecked atop his nose.
But he looked strange. His arm bent at an odd angle. His laughter too high.
“Noctis?” she said. How the air around them rippled like water. “Are you quite well?”
He glanced up at her, his face a pale lantern in the increasing darkness. He did not speak but smiled at her with this twinkle in his eyes. This 'bet you can’t catch me’ look in his eyes. Her mischievous boy. He darted round the corner at the end of the hall, still giggling furiously.
Lunafreya had not heard that sound in so long. Laughter.
Sprinted down the hallway and her dress wisped behind her, the thin layers whisking, catching on the motion of her legs. She ran. Ran as she had not ran in years. Ran as she ran through fields, the clawing of weeds and flowers and nettles at her legs, tearing the skin of her knees.
Ran as she had once ran with her hands wrapped about the handles of Noctis’s wheelchair, pushing him before her. Until gravity swooped them up into her palms, the slippery slant of those grassy fields, a downward tilt. All Lunafreya had to do was hook her dolly shoes onto the back of the wheelchair and hold on tight.
Noctis tossed his little arms in the air, and Lunafreya tossed her head back. Crisp, fresh air stinging at her eyes. Droplets trailing behind her, and she screamed, “Noctis!” cackling wildly. Unbecoming girl. And he shrieked, giddy.
She screamed, “Noctis!” and her throat was harsh from all the shouting. She was screaming, “Noctis!” and it echoed into the forests of Tenebrae that they wheeled through. She was screaming, “Noctis!” and his name echoed in the empty hallways of that manor.
When she thrust herself around the corner, the child was gone. She stopped, a hand against the wallpapered walls. Caught her breath a moment.
It was dark, now. Rain pounded against the roof, a storm raging. The weatherman had not called for a storm. Outside, the moon was suffocated by clouds. Strike of lightning, and the room tore open in a flash, she could see herself for a moment. Her hands seeking.
Seeking a match. Seeking her way toward the fireplace. Groped at decorative tables, and plush, high-backed chairs. It was a study during its prime, and if her fingertips could piece together these clues, these shapes which rose in the darkness before her. Careful, tentative steps she took.
Blocks of firewood piled into a chest in the corner of the room, a poker stood in its stands, she felt its edge. Flinched at its sharpness. Striking a long-stemmed match, a flame burst at the tip and quivered. She tossed the match amidst the kindling, and watched it latch onto the wood, consume them hungrily.
Black smoke festered at the chimney’s mouth. On her knees, she shimmied in closer. Outstretched her hands toward the radiating heat. She wondered if she placed those hands into the smoke, would she burn? As a human woman should. Those licking flames scorching along her arms, her skin charred as the miasma once made it appear.
To think she could once peel darkness from a body like skin from an orange. Consumed that skin like eating, like placing it atop her tongue and swallowing it down her throat. It pooled in her stomach, vibrated along the nerves of her body. She remembered the sensation, still. Remembered the sound of her own screaming, more than the sound of her own laughter.
Lunafreya huddled nearer to the fire, curled her knees up into her dress. Pulled a flask from her satchel and poured herself a cup of tea. She was a firm believer that a cup of tea could solve any problem. Placing it to her mouth, she felt its steam on her upper lip, thankful it was still warm. Sighed in relief.
Next, a baguette and a small block of cheese wrapped in tinfoil, she pulled them out, too. Ripping at the baguette revealed its fluffy insides, and with a cheese knife she tore into the block of brie. It was a little tea party, a small feast.
She had not intended to stay here long. Had not intended on spending the night, but it seemed the weather had other plans. And she had to convince herself that it didn’t mean anything that she was trapped here. To tell herself that it was not a sign, because magic was gone now.
Had to tell herself that boys in hallways were not real, and the only magic that existed was in the flask she held, in the cup of tea she cupped between two hands to take a sip.
Finally, she took from her bag the letter. Dated two days ago, and she knew the tentative cursive of Noctis’s hand by heart, by touch alone. The curled tail of certain letters, the ‘G’s and the ‘Y’s: 'Luna, I’m waiting for you.'
Always ‘Luna’, never ‘Lunafreya’. Always waiting for her.
The fire burned in the hearth before her, and she fed the letter into the flames. It was a bad idea coming here.
She took a bite of her bread and cheese.
The fire crackled. The storm rumbled on, and Lunafreya tried desperately to decipher the words they spoke. Perhaps, this was how others heard the voices of the Gods: as incoherent blocks of uninterrupted noise.
*
On waking up from death, Lunafreya coughed up ten-year-old water from her lungs, caught it in her hands. Her body was a burial site, things came there to die. Things died there. She said the rites herself.
That first breath of air into the lungs was searing like a knife carved into the skin. She can describe the pain as such because she knew what that felt like, still had the scar curved above her hipbone. Still, the pucker of skin where it healed over.
She had not always been such an aloof girl. Now, she sat for hours in the chair of her study, dragging her nails along the armrest. Stared hard at the far wall, wondering if faces were forming in the pattern. When people came back from the dead, they came back different. Came back not quite right.
Her skin with its greenish undertone after not having seen the sun in years. Pruned fingertips and miasma-stained arms. How they twitched in reflex, to remind her that she was alive.
It did not really matter that she had burned the letter, she had already held it for so long that the paper had creased to the shape of fingertips. Tears smudged the ink: 'Hey Luna, catch me if you can.' With the return address as that holiday home in Tenebrae.
When it first arrived, she had placed it beneath a stack of books and a paper weight without showing it to anyone.
In coming here, she assured herself, she was not seeking out her boy, long dead. Magic was gone now. But when they played tippy tag as children, Lunafreya chased Noctis at a bit of a distance to let him think he was winning. She had long legs, always towered over him, such a lanky girl. Ran swifter than he did. This time, she did not intend to chase slowly.
*
No one had asked her what death was like, they were too afraid to know.
Lunafreya awoke with a start, she could not recall having fallen asleep. The door to the room clipped closed, and she stood in time to see the handle shudder to a stillness in the dull light.
A candelabra sat perched on a table adjacent her; its waxen candlesticks frozen in a state of dripping. Held one wick to the dying embers of the fireplace and lit it, then dispensed that light among the other two candles until the candelabra shone full.
The moon glowed blue in the night sky. The storm having eased while she slept. Still, the winds rattled the trees outside, the field and its tall grass; they could not drown out the sounds of footsteps. Someone was in the manor with her, had watched her sleep.
Creeping into the hallway, Lunafreya thrust the candelabra before her. It tossed an elongated shadow to her left, cut abstract against the wall. Her other hand wielded that prodding poker like the trident of the Oracle. The Oracle that was no longer her, that was no longer anyone.
At the top of the stairs, a shape in the darkness. Narrowing her eyes, she raised her light. “Who is there?” she called out. “Show yourself.”
No reply.
“If you are the one who wrote the letter, trust that I do not take kindly to mockery.” Her words hung in the silence.
But that breathing. It wasn’t silence, because the huff of breath from that figure, she heard it. Thick and snuffling.
“Are you unwell?” she asked. Stepped forward when she said it. “Have you got a cold?”
The figure hovered but did not move.
Her leg brushed against something, and she pulled back quick, a sharp intake of breath. Glanced down, and away from the figure.
A wheelchair stood before her. Its metal caught the orange of her flames, those wheels blazing. It was his wheelchair, she knew. The same one from their childhood, those same stickers lined the armrest: little cartoon moogles, they had placed them there themselves. She picked at them, now sun-bleached and peeling.
With one hand holding the candelabra, she placed the poker on the ground and gripped at the handle of the wheelchair, pushed it back and forth smoothly. It had always been too big for him as a young boy, too broad for his small frame.
Suddenly, it felt weighted. A heavier weight than she could recall as a child, the muscles of her arm clenched. A person had manifested there where before there was nothing. Spiked black hair and the broad of shoulders, the sharp cut of a suit jacket. He did not glance up, but raised a white-gloved hand, offering to take the candelabra.
He held it aloft, as Lunafreya guided them forward. Followed a scent in the air, sickly sweet as Tenebraen tarts, they were going toward the kitchen.
She wanted to touch his hair. To see if it was Noctis’s hair, at touch alone she would know for certain. To see if it was as feathery soft as it had been so many years ago. Hair she had brushed before the mirror in her bedroom. Hair she had weaved with sylleblossoms, knitting a crown.
So, in daring to draw that hair aside she revealed a black shirt collar, a neck.
Lunafreya leaned in. Inhaled his scent, a dapple of cologne to the pulse point, and Gods, he had a pulse point. Smelled musky and salted as sea water and fresh fish wriggling on a line, speared by a hook.
With her nose, she nuzzled at the skin of his neck, and he sighed heavily. Tilted his head to the side to give her better access. So, she delved in deeper. Kissed at the throat, slight and quick, just a peck, before her tongue trailed a slick path to his jawline, tasted that salt on his skin.
Her hand slid down from his neck, about his shoulder, to the top button of his shirt. It was already undone, and hastily she undid the rest until her palm could scour every inch of his chest to seek the scars left by the swords of Lucian kings. To seek his nipple and rub her thumb along it.
Not a scar to be felt. Just his warmth beneath her fingertips, her hungry hands. Warm as a body should be, a living body, and he gasped beneath her, soft, and shifted in his seat to press his back nearer to her bending frame. His hands melted against his thighs, splayed along his suit trousers.
“Fuck…” he breathed.
She needed less clothes on him. Needed to scavenge further to find muscle, to find blood and bone. Nibbled at the skin of his neck, caught between her teeth. Licked at the red mark blooming there and grazed more. Listen, listen to his moan. To the guttural noises she could draw from his body.
A crash of lightning. Darkness illuminated beyond the candelabra, and Lunafreya startled. Ripped her hands away from Noctis’s chest, as though her mother had walked in on them grinding. Heavy petting. The tutting mother that was Ramuh.
Glancing to the window, the rain blurred her vision of the world outside, the storm picking up again.
Another crash, as the candelabra fell to the floor. The candles rolled free of their holsters, their flame caught on the fraying carpet, and Lunafreya dropped to her knees and swatted her dress against the budding fire until it was out.
On peering up, the man was gone. The wheelchair empty, because of course it was. Her dress patched with burns. The smell of tarts had gone sour.
The letter was like all his letters were. Tentative boy that he was, even at twenty-years-old. Called her ‘Luna’, asked her how she was feeling, and meant it, and was happy to know.
Sweet in his attention to detail: We did this. We saw this. Ignis made this. And the non-committal tagline of, “Wish you were here,” like a holiday postcard, that maybe meant, I do love you, you know?
Plastered with mementos from his journey across Eos: the silly ones of Kenny Crow, stamps from each fast-food location, and the stranger ones, bumpers stickers with weird slogans, and even a postcard with her own face on it, bearing her trident, which read, ‘Blessings of the Oracle’.
Noctis had found it hilarious at first, so he had said, and comforting as the journey wore on. Kept it beneath his pillow, he admitted, at whatever sleezy motel they were lodged in, as embarrassing as that was.
It was odd, he had said, the act of sharing her love with everyone, because she belonged to everyone. And in a sense, she did; when she responded to him, she could not deny it. Her love was ubiquitous and unconditional, like the love of a saint. She aided those in Niefelheim, as well as those in Lucis; an agent of the Gods did not discriminate.
A photograph Prompto had taken showed both him and Noctis pointing excitedly at some graffiti on a building-side: ‘LONG LIVE THE ORACLE.’ This mural of herself just outside of Altissia, in her white robes and what Noctis called her ‘fancy priestess hat’, smiling shy like he was meeting a celebrity he admired.
Asked could he wear the hat when they finally met up.
To which she said, “That would be a sacrilege”, but assured him they could craft him a little makeshift hat from paper and glue, which also seemed sacrilegious, but it made Noctis laugh, and Lunafreya adored making him laugh even if she could not hear the laughter.
She wondered if that mural was still there. Wondered if it had been defaced or covered up or simply faded away over time.
It was easier, she thought, being a symbol of peace than being a woman. Easier being a martyr or a saviour, than a human being because now she stood in queues at the shopping centre like everyone else, with a basket under her arm, reading the label for a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Normal life.
Remembered the time she had fasted for forty-eight hours straight before performing a ritual in a small, occupied village to the south of Tenebrae, pleading for a bountiful harvest that coming spring. And now, she could buy a bottle of wine all for herself, whenever she wanted, and down the entire thing in one sitting.
Noctis had promised to take her for a burger and chips, and a Sprite which he insisted is better at the Crow’s Nest than it is just from a tin, but she had never had either. “Luna, giving you a Sprite might kill you instantly,” he had joked.
To which she said: “I do no fear death.”
This letter was much the same. A polaroid of the manor taped to the inside of the envelope, and a curly red arrow pointed to its entrance: ‘I’M HERE!’ It was a game. Hide and seek. Like childhood.
In the overwhelming pitch-blackness, Lunafreya felt her way onward with precarious steps. Fingertips ghosting the walls, ghosting against portraits and statues. Suits of armour, cool to the touch. Then, a handle, and she pulled open a door, and fumbled into a room.
It was bright. Orange light, hundreds of candles flickering, how her eyes took a moment to adjust. Blinked, blinked, until the strain ceased, and the room developed before her. It was a bedroom. Deep plum-hued and a queen-sized bed with four posters, a large curtain cocooning it. She could only guess at what housed inside.
And there it was: his portrait, stood atop an easel and caged in an oval frame, the portrait of Noctis as a grown man, the very portrait that should have lined those walls alongside his fellow Lucian royalty. Of thirty-years-old, perhaps, or older still, with stubble rough along his chin, his cheeks. Lucious hair swept back and trickling over his shoulder. A shining pendent dangling from his ear.
Surrounded by those candles and thousands of bouquets of flowers, their freshness stifling the air: sylleblossoms, from the open fields of Tenebrae. She used to make up bouquets herself, now her hands shook too much to hold those tiny scissors. To navigate thorns. She would prick her finger and watch the bead of blood, the pop.
The smell, that smell was nauseating.
He looked too serious. It did not suit him. Staring off to some distance, and she almost wished he had refused to sit for the portrait. She wanted to reach out, hold that cheek and guide his gaze toward her once more.
And she knew she was unstable, then. Knew that this portrait should not exist, when could it have been painted? Noctis had left the crystal, only to be plunged headfirst into his destiny, his demise.
Reaching out her index finger, she prodded at the forehead of his portrait. To his jaw, and his lips. Felt beneath her fingertips how the paint protruded the canvas; how easy it would be to chip away with her nails. Lunafreya, the archaeologist, tomb raider: unearthing from this man’s features those of the boy she once knew.
Smoother skin, brighter eyes, curtained by messy spikes. She could rid him of his wrinkled brow, the frown lines, the worries that they connoted. There was her boy again. Flushed brown and twenty-years-old, her boy of great sorrow. She could have painted him happy, but that would not make him so.
Lunafreya kissed the portrait. Cold of the oil paint against her lips, smell of turpentine tickling her nostrils, stronger than the flowers. Her fingers strummed along that oval frame, ornate branches decorated it, gold. Her body shivered.
The texts cannot tell you what happens to a person when they come back from the dead, not the Oracle texts nor the Cosmogony. Could never have guessed how hungry they feel, how unsatisfied.
How Lunafreya could still feel the seaweed slimy on her limbs, the fish eating at her flesh. Eating at what she had ate, had not yet digested. Gods she was hungry.
She turned toward that bed with heavy-lidded eyes. Padded across the floor. The light of the candles made shadows puppets on those curtains; she tore them back. And there he was. As Snow white, as Sleeping Beauty, lain along the mattress with his hands clasped together against his stomach, a sheer black veil about his face.
The hush made every sound more vivid: twitch of lights, the house heaved a breath, expanding. The rain had lulled, listen to the sound of a bird outside chirping its dirge song. Her own heart thumping in her chest, heavy as a drumbeat. Listen to it.
In the silence, she could hear that he was not breathing, could see that the shape of his mouth moulded into the veil did not disturb the fabric. Which meant that this really was her boy. Her love.
Pinching both bottom corners of the veil, she peeled it back. To brown lips, stiff. A sloped nose. That jaw slender and shaved clean, he was just as the portrait had suggested: muse of the romantics, creature of oil paint and the impressions of a brush. She only knew him in abstractions.
Careful. Do not break the boy.
Ah, but the boy is already broken.
She bent down low, took his face in her hands. Placed her forehead to Noctis’s own.
Once before, she might have whispered down his throat about the blessed stars and delivery from darkness. Repeated it, quicker and more desperate. But now such prayer was useless. She would not glow golden in miraculous light.
So, she kissed him. First kiss, finally. And from his mouth unearthed the swords of former Lucian kings so embedded in his stomach. Clasped with her teeth their handles and tore them free like a splinter from his skin. His lips pliable, parted soft for her as she slipped her tongue inside.
Hiking the skirts of her dress up, she climbed atop the bed and tossed her leg over his body, straddling his hands. Guided his hands to the thick muscle of her thighs. Tore at the flesh of his lower lip, hungry girl.
She pulled back, dragged that lower lip with her, let it flick back into place. To his pink eyes frenzied and searching every inch of her face. His greying hair splayed beautifully along the pillow. Lips swollen red from the force of her kiss, and breathing, those lips seeking air in thick gulps, he hadn’t breathed in so long.
“Take it easy, my love,” she said. “I'm here. I will care for you now."
“Luna?” he asked, how his voice cracked.
She stroked his head, petted his hair: “Welcome home,” she said.
And his expression melted to a softness. To swimming eyes and pouted lips, imagine that – still pouting at his grown age. And: “This isn’t real,” he said. “This can’t be real.”
“My little cry baby,” she tutted. “My sad little boy, enough of that.”
He laughed, watery.
She clamped her fingers at his chin, drawing him in once more.
Perhaps, to love him had always been to love a dead thing. This boy who donned a coffin like a suit jacket to his eighteenth birthday, or his seventh birthday. He did not make it to his twenty-first.
When Lunafreya first rose from the water she had died in, she had screeched at the top of her lungs, ear-splitting. Thrashed at the rolling waves which swallowed her body up to her waist, thrashed and hissed and batted away. Slinked from the sea foam, dressed torn and dripping wet, and something else torn, too. Something inside. Irreparable.
She had hands that she did not know what to do with. Picking at petals that no longer existed on her skin, phantom pain. Lips made for uttering prayers and kissing princes, and both of those were null, now.
She had earthly desires. Was finally permitted to have them, and they fled from the earth with his dying bones. She had desires.
Twisted her tongue about his own, she coaxed a moan from his throat. His hot hands caressing the length of her spine, groping clumsily for the zipper of her dress, and freed her back to the cold air. Outside, that storm roared. But he looked so beautiful, her boy.