I say your name

RORY

There were a thousand rational thoughts he should've paid attention to—the knowledge of a life survived in the Hollowed Grounds, every little detail that kept him on this side of Mort's domain. He should've known better, but all he could think of was this: she had been here and he hadn't let her in—

It would've been so easy to open the door. His fingers had been upon the lock and the handle, his heart begging, half for her and the other half for anything to make him feel alive in that bottomless black, a darkness so compact it had swarmed his soul. Somewhere, he knew that he would've welcomed death, had it worn his sister's shape and spoken to him in his sister's voice.

(Fuck, he would've welcomed death in any shape)

What he should tell himself was that it couldn't possibly have been her, and even if it had been, she wouldn't have been so stupid as to come during Long Night.

What he was telling himself was that he was a horrible brother and that he still had no answers and why was she gone and—

Amalia's heartbeat was thunder in his ears, her pulse a wild animal under his cheek, her breath a warm cloud in the frigid morning—a morning that was barely bright yet, the last of the natural darkness clinging to the western sky.

The question she asked made sense

(more sense than anything else so far)

The question she asked made him want to close his eyes and perhaps pretend he hadn't heard it, or else just cry, because what could it mean except that she was dead?

"No," he admitted after a silence that felt too long, weighed down by the war he had waged against himself: to admit what a fool he was, or.. or to cling to some shred of hope that things had been different this year?

"She was up on the porch," he went on, his heart heavy, voice dead, nose full of the smell of leather conditioner, "by the door, so.. so much herself... She knew things... I..."

I wish I had opened the door. I wish I could've known, if just for a moment.

Helplessly, he gestured towards the open barn, the blanket, the cleaned tack. "How else would you explain this?" he whispered, broken.

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.