to be lit up from within
vein by vein
Possibly, part of it had been the lack of vengeance. The way it had all gone nowhere – the rage, the spitting vitriol, the wanton distaste for moments taken from her, fleeting, as if she’d been nothing at all. Dust. Ash. Bone. To face her own mortality had been a rancorous slap, and to see it again, here and now, in places and punctures in between and on the stupid ass face of Snah brought back how stupid she’d been. How careless. How easy it’d been to crumble. How her body couldn’t seem to forget and forego; either because she wasn’t letting it, or she wasn’t ready to give that part of herself away again. To recognize the shape of her demise in the zigzag portion of one spark. That’s all it had taken to fell Melita, after years and years and years of surviving. One stray portion of lightning wielded by a moron. A mistake, he’d said.A constant reminder that for all her confidence and brazenness and boldness, how it had served her, guided her, made her grow, all of that could still come crashing down.
She watched the snowman practically cave in; kept Iskra as a bulwark while the lines of static drove onward. She could hear his chuckling…should she have been laughing too? Uncertain and wanting to bury herself against him, his encouragement was a curious little spark of its own, nestled into her ribcage, trying, with great tenacity and might, to overcome all the other harsh outlines. “Maybe this was a bad idea,” she managed to unfurl between clenched teeth, shaking her head as the vulnerabilities threatened to loosen each bit and piece of her armor.
Then he drowned them out; the noise and cacophony softening and pulling and then not there when his lips were on hers. Another little act of defiance, to seek out the furies and pluck them from her mind in one fell swoop; she couldn’t hear anything else when her heart was pulsing and pounding with declarations from Iskra, both said and implicit. Something to be proud of. Something to hold. Something to treasure. So she grasped onto it like a precious gem, a jewel, a glow, a part of life she’d been starved of.
She took him in, fingers swooping upwards like clutching for a lifeline and finding his jaw; mouth intermingling and parting from his to take a few unsteady breaths and lean her forehead against his. “Okay,” like that was all it took when that was far beyond the course, but if he was confident in it, she could muster the bravado too.
Another shaky turn of her lungs echoed and her eyes narrowed, glancing away from him briefly to seize the emboldened portions when she had them – sizzling another long streak of lightning from the depths and watching as it struck Snah with a low blow to his makeshift body. She still shook, but this had been hers to muster and control. “Can you do it again too?” she whispered, afraid to bend and break. “I want to see if it’s just someone else using it or-,” the unknown, the ability, the notion, the element itself.
to be the sun
MELITA
