Chapter 40 Bound
Bound
For a long time, the world is dark and smells of cinder.
When new worlds are created, they often begin in this chaotic way.
I am wrapped up in the slow moving arms of Lir as we lay surrounded by our crimes, our revenge against this world.
I wiggle my head free and try to find his face, what was once so full of twinkling wonder has become hardened by pain and exhaustion.
Even when he was mortally wounded before, he had an air of casualty to the prospect of death.
“Lir?” I encouragingly murmur searching for him through his exuberant curls. His sad eyes becoming black pools of my reflection. “You heard me...” I tuck his hair behind his ears trying to frame the face before me into one I once recognized.
“How could I not? When your voice could shake my very soul back and forth within my body. Its frequency carried across the waves reverberating to become my very own pain.” He looks at me sternly.
His words vibrating in his chest, instead of song through his lips.
“You are my mate—forever. You could not run from me, nor I from you. To be loved is to be changed, even if it means into something both of us no longer recognize.”
I look down at my flesh, caked in a mixture of ash, soot and my own dried blood.
The tiny glimmering scales which I spent so long trying to meticulously remove have begun to sprout once again and I now fully understand his words.
He looks at my scales and a tear runs down his cheek, a silent weep.
I look him over seeing no wounds, no spears. No, he cries for me.
“Don’t worry, you came in time. They didn’t do anything to me—” I whisper attempting to console him.
“I did.” He confesses solemnly.
No amount of denial comforts him. Grasping at my arms he runs his fingers down those lustrous flakes. He shakes me with an exhausted urgency. “Look! Look at what I’ve done to you.”
Instead of looking at myself, instead of looking into his eyes, I look towards the blackened rocks of Cape Despair sinking like some ancient city back into the sea.
I see one of those men’s revolvers, waterlogged and already damaged.
Soon, the sea will corrode it and render it completely useless.
I think how its bullet would have felt similar to the hoarse cries now coming from Lir’s lips.
I can feel the guilt wracking through his whole body.
He didn't know that his love would do this to me. How can we know what anyone’s will do.
I fondly run my hands over my new adornments and then over his own changed body.
He has transformed so much since I first met him as well and who’s to say I haven’t been just as much the cause.
His face is older, more lines of concern marked by having someone to be concerned for.
His whole body has shed a new repetitively, but the original scars from our first encounter are still visible and I find it all beautiful.
The sea has worn us both down into the most perfect fit for each other.
“Lir, like you said—to love is to be changed, and it’s not always bad. It is to be altered, to be visibly mended and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I try to make my voice comforting despite the circumstances and I brush his cheek with the backs of my fingers.
His large hand thumbs the small clumpings of scales surrounding the gills that have now matured on my sides.
Following the scales up to my shoulders and down along my arms like the finest opera gloves leading to my now webbed fingers.
I have transformed and it causes my heart to ring out like a bell.
No longer lost within me, now steady and true.
He looks past me for a long time, quietly we sit watching the last flames of destruction burn out until all that’s left are Lir and I—and this rock in the sea.
Intertwined in each other we begin to kiss and caress each other.
Looking for wounds to coddle, discovering both the changes to his body and my own.
He kisses my trembling lip, breaking his stoic expression to mold his mouth into mine.
We make love to comfort and console our hearts which have been broken and sewn back together now in so many different ways.
As he enters me and stretches every part to fit the raw extension of his throbbing heart, it feels more like a claiming ritual than our desire filled animalistic fucking.
He intentionally and slowly moves in and out of me in order to prove that he is the only one that could satisfy me, the only one who could ever dare to be fully enveloped by me.
That he is what fully fills every cavity of my heart.
He holds me down against the rock, watching carefully as I gasp and moan beneath him.
Though I look so human, so frail to him as he says, I no longer feel it. For I have the same power over him as he does of me, pushing back with every thrust against me, sopping up every ounce of him I can. I pull in desperately for his touch, only his, to be all over me.
We both cry out in pleasure and pain. Pain to never know the innocent warm comfort our love once held, all those messages in bottles have been shattered and burned leaving our raw souls to bear the brunt of these feelings.
The ocean laps up all around us, its cacophonous roar from the orchestral pit at the bottom of the ocean serenading our finale on this stage we have broken in two.
He holds my hips releasing with every shudder of ecstasy all the love he can gift in our bound exchange. I writhe beneath the pressure against my spasming insides, staring up into his drunken gaze knowing he will be mine, always.