RORY
Ella kept standing there by the door, her tail wagging, her eyes confused as she whined and looked to Rory: why aren't we letting her in? What's wrong?He met those brown eyes time and again, his fingers nearly numb and his mouth tasting awful (like death). He didn't feel as if he held his life in his hands, in that fragile contraption between his shuddering fingertips, but rather as if someone had put his head in the mouth of a giant wolf and asked him to guess whether it would bite or not.
She answered him honestly, but just as easily as the first part convinced him not to open the door, she went on to tear at his convictions again. It was different—surely he knew that? Felt that? Expected that, given how much had changed in the past two years? And she mentioned him and Vaya gorging themselves on food and then sleeping it off, as so often had been the case, almost laughing that bit of fond memory and Rory's eyes were blurring with hot, shameful tears.
"No monsters," he breathed back at her, through the wood separating them, such a strange and sacred barrier between life and death. (No monsters—except this one?) Why, of all the things, would she come back during LongNight? Would a year have changed her so much?
Hadn't it changed him just as much?
"So then you'll be fine out there just a little longer, huh? There's plenty of straw in the barn, to keep you warm, if you need a place to sleep, right?"
Did monsters and ghosts sleep?
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
