Glass Miles
PART THREE: ON BUTTERFLY WINGS
The window is open to let in the sun and the wind, but the air of the room is heavy and it hurts to draw breath, should you enter.
He does not enter. He cannot enter. His place is this niche beneath the window sill, grass matted and damp beneath his hands, the breeze cool across his eyelids, the bricks even cooler against his back, listening and not understanding—
—but he's alright with that.
Sunlight through the tree dapples across his face, lighting it in strange patterns of fire—in the room, a single beam lances across the shadows, a reflection off gold, illuminating for a moment ebony wood and silver strings, pale hands ghosting and gliding in the darkness.
The notes dance like butterflies over his head and he almost rises to grasp them, but his hands cannot reach—but then they are dark, and heavy, butterflies falling swift to the earth and vanishing and he wants to cry—both for their loss and for what has replaced them.
This heavy sadness in the air; singing, lamenting, almost...crooning for memories that are just that—memories. It hurts his heart in ways he doesn't understand, to listen.
Abruptly the music stops; a curse lights the air and with a clank and a clatter angry footsteps are his only warning before he is suddenly looking up into pale, furious—
—scared?—
—eyes.
"What are you doing here?" the other hisses, low and deadly as he leans over the sill, hands clenched pale and trembling upon it, still itching for the dance they were engaged in only moments before.
"...listening," he replies, and can see the surprise that lights those eyes, quickly hidden.
"Why are you here?" they ask, exasperation plain.
He turns his gaze downward. "I'm always here," he whispers. "Don't you know?"
Exasperation turns to something unfathomable, and then to something heartbreakingly gentle. He starts as fingertips brush beneath his eyes: averts his gaze when they come away damp.
"Why are you crying?"
He closes his eyes and watches the ghosts of memories dance in the shadows to a melody only they can hear.
"For the butterflies," he whispers. "They...they were beautiful, once."
There is a long silence, thick with words they don't say—will never say.
"...they were," the other says finally, softly. "Once upon a time."
- fin -