if you and I can make it through the night

WAKER

She's gone when you wake up.

You can't fault her for it—you're a bit of meaningless driftwood washed up on shore, something she fished out of the ocean, shook out, and hung to dry. In the absence on the sun she made one herself, and at some point, satisfied that the sea would not take you back, she left.

If it wasn't for the embers glowing hotly in their cradle, you would've thought her nothing more than a fever dream, but as it stands, she has to be real. You wouldn't have made a fire. You wouldn't have thought of it. You wouldn't have known how.

Still, it's a bitter way to wake up, abandoned by your savior. She picked you up at the doors of death but left you in a black ocean of a different kind. You blink in the pallid light of the new winter's day. You still can't fault her for it, and the disappointment stinging your heart is a brief whisper. After all, you know nothing about her. She put you back together and got you somewhere warm; what more can you ask? For her to mother you? For her, a stranger, to guide you through the darkness you feel beckoning on the edges of your still-fuzzy mind?

You're insane, Waker. She was right to get out while she could, without having to feel guilty about having killed you by leaving you in the awfully cold world.

You lay where she left you for a long, long time, sprawled on your side. You ache all over. You want to stretch. You need to piss. You're hungry. The embers cool and flicker and die to dull gray sparking with red and orange each time the breeze finds your shelter. You wish sleep would come back, so you can forget in the blissful oblivion, but you know it won't come. For better or for worse, you're awake now.

Hours pass, and light begins to wane. You waited for her, but she didn't come back.

In the end, you get up, hesitantly, like a newborn colt stumbling on awkwardly long and weak legs. You drag your wings to your sides and make it to the lip of the shelter, resting a feathery shouldered against the rough, old bark. The world beyond is foreign and frightening, and smells of things it shouldn't.

Eyes flicker in the trees. The shadows seem to glow with light, a perplexing contradiction of the very nature of shadows, and you shiver as the cold air slips through your thin summer coat. You need food, and you need it fast, or your saving will have been for nothing.

Feeling both mulish and dejected, you trudge into the white world, wings close for the warmth trapped between the feathers. You've lost everything but yourself, and as you disappear from the shelter and the memories of yesterday, you're thinking that you might as well lose that as well. You're not sure you'll be wanting the pieces of yourself.

[ The end. <3 ]