Catching Burning Birds | 2 | Culebra
Title: Catching Burning Birds
Author: Kali
Rating: T
Summary: He's not some stupid bird that can't stay dead. She's not some big cat to be tamed. These are things they don't know.
Note: Inspired by Gravidy's The God of the Lost, in the Harry Potter category.
Disclaimer: Queen of Swords belongs to Fireworks/Paramount. The plot and word order are mine.
He remembers:
One day in New Mexico when they are both tired from running and trying to die, and all he really thinks is how if he has to die he wants to be clean and not covered in bitter desert dust like he's old sunbleached bones. Which he's not. Bleached hair, yes, like the color of sweet corn, but skin like leather, like cowhide, like ochre. But bleached, lightening eyes whose colors fades out with every scan of sand and scruff brush for black, like the desert dust wouldn't turn that a bitterroot brown, too.
The one thing still blue and pristine-not his eyes, not his clothes, no the sapphire she still wears-is a small cold pool fed by a small cold spring. He sinks into it and lets it carry his dust coat away into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He sinks and forgets the fact that he is a dead man. And that's nice. And he closes his lighter than sky eyes and that's nice, too. And stupid, which he realizes when there's a tiny splash. On the banks is a pile of brown-black clothes. In the water is dusty silken skin and dusty brown-black hair and a dusty sapphire. In the water is silken skin against his and those lips and those beautiful undusted eyes.
After it's done she'll shrug it off as her moment of weakness in a year of vulnerability and get dressed with those firefly eyes fixed on the dark shadows of Culebra Peak. She will not focus on how his eyes are blue again or how they're shimmering at her with his weakness.
And he understands, way deep down, that it means nothing, but it reminds of him those days when they'd lie under the afternoon sun and talk about futures with bright faces that would have his blue eyes-she hoped-or her baby browns-he knew-and all he wants is to take back his years of idiocy and lie under the afternoon sun again.
She buttons up the black blouse over mirages of leopard spots and he decides he doesn't want another second without her satin. He surges out of the pool and grabs her around the waist and kisses her like the still loves him. He savors every successive sigh as she loosens up and kisses back, savors every successive inch as she strips and sinks. He even savors the way she whispers the path to death into his skin.