A/N: Here is an FGB drabble for PerfectMeadow. She gave me a bunch of prompts, but the one I used was this photo:
http:/ i46(dot)tinypic(dot)com/2q81p55(dot)jpg
Three Birds
The inside of your wrist is a private place. It's where you dab perfume. It's where someone presses two fingers to feel your pulse. It's where he kisses you, and only him, because he's the only one you trust enough to brush his lips so tenderly and yet so close to the veins, to the life, snaking underneath. Wrists are pale no matter how much time you spend outdoors, as if the sun itself feels it improper to gaze on the secret skin.
So it was not without significance that Bella chose this spot to mark herself on her eighteenth birthday. Three birds, each representing an escaping soul. The first: for the night when his life was taken away, a lifetime before she was born. The second: for the night they became one body, one flesh, when she gave herself to him because she wanted to be consumed, inside and out, by his touch. And the third: for the night he left—"for her own good," he'd said—when she felt that last bit of her soul fly away, hovering over him as he walked farther and farther away from her until he disappeared completely. "Live your life," he'd said. "Be happy."
But of course there was no life left in her, no matter how strong the pulse beat against her fingers whenever she'd grip her wrist, trying to remember the feel of his lips on her skin.
The needle hurt, with its slow, relentless buzz, and she teared up, her vision hazy. Everything looked like an impressionist painting, blurry, watery, dull, yet somehow beautiful in its vagueness. Still, it was nice to feel something.
She felt each bird being inked on her skin, and the dull aching of each one brought to her mind bright visions of the three souls.
The man carefully taped the gauze to her wrist when he was finished. As she walked back alone into the dark, wet night, she clutched her arm to her chest, the gauze like a shroud, her heart beating against the new soreness. "Fly away now," she whispered. "Fly away home."