#saintemia

“Morgana.”

Once, the sight of her would have made him cry tears he would have been ashamed of, now he feels like if he did cry at all, they would be tears of joy.

She’s not healed. Not completely. Not physically and not spiritually.  There are scars that will mark them both through eons of reconstruction into happier times.

A gust of wind blows by them, causing the trees to sway and their robes; her deep maroon and his red to pick up and dance around them with the leaves. Her figure seems frailer than he remembers, his must as well. They have no power here. 

Here they are both just people.

“Are you alright?” the question comes out without prompting, before a million other more important questions that she’ll answer more honestly. But sometimes, it was important people who would never be normal to have normal conversations.

“I thought, out of all of us you’d want to move on the most.”

We’d hate to see one of our dearly beloved perish, so allow us to fulfill that need:

He partakes because it is expected of him. He is no glutton for food, only for tricks and lies: He doesn’t pick at his food even though he has no care for what the host has plated for him. His entire image is carefully crafted upon non-assumptions and conciliation.

After he swallows the first tepid morsel, he feels a warmth bloom in his chest. His cheeks burn. His fork clatters against the chinaware and he covers his face, eyes widening in surprise more than anything.

Eyes are upon him. Anxious for answers, he peers up and locks gazes with another. Something starts to bubble out of his throat--

{ Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me?

She sits along the seaside, toes idly creeping along the sand — Jacopo stands tall as his eyes rover over the tides, hands settling against his hips. There’s no telling what’s on the other side, what lurks beneath the shore — a realm far beyond them, that extends to a place he knows nothing of.

It picks at his brain, his imagination, tempts him to lug a wooden boat across the beach and go at it. She’ll hop in first and he’ll sit right behind her, rowing them along, armed against the tides with nothing more than a pair of wooden paddles. He’ll steal glances at her, her velvety red hair as it shimmers in the sun, the way the gold of her eyes flickers across the water. And he’ll...

With a squawk of a seagull, his dreams drift into the air yet again. Ah. “Morgana,” he says firmly, as though it’s an attempt to wake himself up. Morgana, Morgana, Morgana, that name belongs to a person, a person only feet away from him, and the thought alone fills his chest with a boundless warmth. Morgana.

He is a goddamn buffoon and he knows it.

“You said you wanted to see the seaside, didn’t you? This is only a fraction of it. If we went by boat, we could easily see the ocean in its entirety.” Jacopo smiles. It’s difficult not to, not when those familiar tresses of red spill over her shoulders, not when he can see the sun reflected in those eyes of hers. “How about it?”

@saintemia

So this was death, huh? Although she was supposed to be Catholic, Maria hadn’t really... believed in heaven. Or maybe, she hadn’t believed in it for herself. Those were the first thoughts that filled her mind, that made her mind and her body real in a sense. Before she thought those things, had she really been there? What existed without thought? Even some shadowy specter had to have thoughts of it own, right?

But she wasn’t a shadow. She knew who she was. Her name was Maria Campanella, and she was dead. The rest of it, though... It was like trying to remember a dream. She felt separated from her memories, what she could remember anyways. But she was remembering it, piece by piece. Her hand drifted to her forehead, and she felt exactly what she expected to feel. Blood. She had been shot, after all. 

Not that that mattered much in the afterlife. And as she thought that, her wound seemed to disappear. But, if this was heaven or hell or whatever, shouldn’t someone be there to tell her as much? Guide her journey, judge her sins, torture her for eternity? With that in mind, she kept walking. 

The forest around her gradually thinned out, and before she knew it, she was in a clearing. Tree stumps were scattered throughout the clearing, and if a tree was still standing, it was clearly rotting. On one of the tree stumps sat a girl, not that much younger than her. There was something familiar about her, though she couldn’t place where they had met before. 

Grinning, Maria approached her, plopping next to her on the stump. 

“Hey, you don’t mind if I sit here, do ya?”

Beautiful as expected! Morgana has been accepted!