Re: The Icarus/The Fallen
Nathaniel shook his head, his expression thin and astringent. “Not a skill, either. It was ripped away from me when they took my wings,” and he’d forgotten that he hadn’t mentioned that part to Enlil. The gaping void he would have sworn was hemorrhaging between each sharp angle of his shoulder blades, oozing down his spine and pooling beneath him on the bench until it brimmed over and onto the floor. He shut his eyes for a moment, squeezing thumb and forefinger around the fine bones around the man’s wrist. “I stopped being a great and terrible thing the second that I was cast out, and now I’ve nothing left except my name.”
And was that even his? Could a thing belong to one that hadn’t been freely given, but assigned as a matter of course during one’s fulfilment of purpose? It was ordained, but that didn’t mean it was his. And if he wasn’t a terror and he wasn’t a man, well - then he might as well simply cease to exist, climb into the pine box of the piano and wait to be dug down into the earth as it trembled under the train’s wheels.
If he was unmoored, then the jovial quirk of Enlil’s lips was to be his anchor. The whites of his eyes, a washed-out lighthouse winking safe passage. Nathaniel’s face had shifted by the time he opened his eyes and the world shifted with it, because he felt the familiar weight of reverence writ in lip and brow again. The pad of his thumb stroked over lilac spiderweb lines, featherlight. He couldn’t help but imagine turning his palm to the sky and offering the underside of his wrist. Instead he just shook his head, the curled ends of his hair at the back of his neck whispering against his collar.