~o~
The cries of ascending birds echoed over the valley.
Will could hear their gathered wings and voices. Vaguely, he could discern their dark bodies as they wavered against the black sky. All was moving shapes, no definition. He could feel the trees in the shadows by him, the pool of days old ash from a fire he'd set alone. The raised land, the holes in the ground made by animals he never would see.
The flock of birds flew over him, the empty fields, over places his heart feared.
He was in the dark, but his house of golden lights was somewhere above waves, gently rocking.
Watching the house glow, he heard music in a breeze. Gently it crept to his ear, over his lips, entering him. The lyrics were away, beyond his understanding, but he could see in them a man. In the night the frame of a man came toward him. His gentle steps made through soft, shallow waters. His thin ankles like rods above the tides of grass.
And he was in his arms; in his lungs. His coat, like his hair, gelid. All nearest the elements felt unlike him, as if unbeknownst to Will, what he for seconds knew by touch was the other man's soul.
Like fallen snow.
He could feel the doctor's fingers brushing against the temples of his glasses, his hand to the base of his neck bringing him closer.
Will felt memories, different moments that may have at one time not been his own.
To his face was the mouth of another. The hands of another.
Blood on the doctor's jagged teeth. His beautiful teeth, from the corner of a wounded lip.
And there was nothing but feeling, no sight. All the warmth of unconsciousness; the red-pinks of skin covering sight.
The music grew with the wind. Will felt himself pulled downwards by it; high in the air only to fall.
~o~
There was a tide of black. A tide created by a man wearing the color of night as his skin.
Sliding from one shadow to another, as a fish moving from the open to the shelter of swaying reeds, he remained mostly unseen, save for antler, for bone.
The room was him. The night was him, and he was all the blood it contained.
All the blood he had made leave bodies.
Will felt it leave him. Leave him through the scars of old wounds, pulled as though by force. By his own accord. By his own ache. Iron to a magnet.
But the shadow was gone. Perhaps in a trickle it had dissolved into him and was now in his veins.
He felt the dark man's arms around his waist, at the beginning of a hip. Bare fingers crawling over exposed skin. Something over them, something like water but not. A cover with the same sort of weight.
There was no light, no vision, only the feeling of the doctor's hands covering his body. The heaviness of his body against his. The warmth of his breath as noises left him. Sounds from the cages he kept locked with restraint he opened for Will without meaning to.
Will had pulled with him the key, under the blackness of a patch of soul within him, one hued by the whispers of another man.
And under his fingers is his skin.
~o~
When he breathes, he hears his heart beating distantly, as though the pulse of another. A person he cannot see, lost far in the trees.
He waits in the water, searching the moss and hazel colored rocks under the surface; imagining minnows moving near his legs in circles, to his sides wandering.
Near his head he sees his arm as he casts the line over his shoulder and into depths like a mirror. A churning mirror he could walk into, wants to walk into and under. Just the feeling of it against his hand and it's already inside; a part of him.
The warmth is one entered, one that as a building is known. The walls and corners, into their spaces of air, arms raised. But the arms closing around him are not his own.
The soul he exposes is his, though. Piercing through skin, as from womb, it departs to be pulled backward, as a newly formed ring of smoke by the other.
~o~
He steps from darkness to a room with a narrow line of light. Dull, glowing faintly. It has the mute vibration of sanitariums, their long inner halls. There are no memories of the moments before, only those of his current state: specks of ivory merging with filmy layers of shadow.
In the half-light he sees the doctor. He can hear him speaking in a voice above a whisper; one loosened from need of sleep, as he trims the herbs growing alongside the dark wall.
Speaking, reciting lyrics, as he does not know he is watched.
Graham watches in silence as the doctor moves; his eyes searching the wall and leaves but not seeing them.
~oOo~