After Tempest Comes Calm

AFTER TEMPEST COMES CALMS--
 
"What do you think of eternity?" Dim lights; distant ships and a distant moon. The Outsider's form is a shadow on the rocks at his side.
 
 A young woman’s clothing rustles as she shifts, she folds her arms behind his head and looks for patterns in the skies of blue and red. The wind whistles, whispers, and waves roll slow and unending, like heartbeats. The tide is coming in.
 
 The woman tilts her head to look at the Outsider, as best as she can make out. He blends so well in shadows, soft edges and blurred features, an inky obscuration on otherwise dull grey stone. Harmonic, like whales at sea; he melds the colors of their world to sit in a comfortable palette around his sprawled form.
 
 What would she give, to never leave this place? She can breathe, here. Here the distant birds caw and call, and cool salt breeze clears the city smoke from her lungs.
 
Inhale, exhale. There is no time, here. 
 
The world is an oval from where she lies, arched and endless above her wondering eyes. She wonders, and wishes to wander, to each and every star that shines so bright and far and free. The walls she built from secrets, shame and solitude, all crumbled like sand under the patient tide and blew apart like wisps between her uncaring fingers. There is no suffering, here.
 
 Her voice is soft, measured by the wind and waves, and no louder.
"I don't. It's everything, everywhere, and for all time. That's not something everyone stops to think about."
 
She can't see the Outsider's smile; it's in the rustle of grass and cree cree cree of crickets in the darkness. For a second the air is warm and dry, and smells of gum-trees and bonfire smoke; these are the smiles she has come to know.
 
"You think of me."
 
 "Constantly."
 
 "There is no difference."
 
"I suppose not."
 
 Light, dimmed. A lone cloud obscures the moon and the young woman closes her eyes for one languid moment; she floats in solitude, but this time there is no cage with glass floors, splitting and spreading outwards like spiders webs. 
 
"What do you think of death?"
 
She opens her eyes, and there is still no cage. There is no glass at her feet. "Depends on the kind. I'm against anything painful, but most people don't get a say in the method."
 
"It could have hurt." She knows the Outsider's moods and whims, as sailors know the tides. Sometimes he is cold, endless ocean abyss, and others he is sunlight on the waves, bright and joyful. 
 
Sometimes he is here and only here, and those black leviathan's eyes see only her (it feels a little like gazing up at the sky, only to find it looking right back), and others he is a thousand, thousand fates and futures, scattered between what was and was not and could have been, if only.
 
"So many times, and in so many ways. Missteps that left you stunned, a turn that could leave you smashed against a tree, glass shattering beneath your face, people you could not dodge, and rats that devour you, had you been a little slower." 
 
"But I wasn't," the woman says. "I am as quick as I need to be."
 
 "You don’t always think so." Sometimes he is neither deity, nor consort, but spiteful as a child, pulling the wings from moths to count the ways in which they writhe. The young woman shifts in place, the rocks at her back suddenly sharp. "You could die, couldn’t you? An assassin's blade would have split your flesh like a whaler's harpoon, stunned you and sliced you, drained your life with its withdrawal. It would have hurt."
 
 Silence; the woman counts his own heartbeat and licks his lips. Salt, not blood. All the difference in the world.
 
"I would not have liked that eventuality," The Outsider says at last, and the wind blows cold and bitter against the woman's cheeks.
 "Is this your way of telling me you'd mourn if I died?" She ventures. The chill seeps through her clothes, bone-deep and biting, a kiss from the Void.
 
"It is not in my nature to mourn."
 
"Don't be stubborn."
 
 "I offer you eternity. An absence of ending, the cessation of existence; we need not part, and so I need not mourn. And yet you refuse. Am I the stubborn one?"
 
"You're the impatient one, certainly. I haven't said no; I need more time to consider."
 
"I cannot protect you from your own mortality, girl. Of the countless possibilities ahead of you death features as often as survival, and I cannot know where your choices will lead you." Frustration bleeds through every word, and the crickets all fall silent as one.
 
Her lips twitch, though the cold makes her shiver. "Would it be that difficult to just admit you care?" 
 
Exhale, a soft sigh in the pool of shadows to his right. "There are times when I despise humans." 
 
The Outsider moves like oil on water, like the razor-toothed sharks that stalk the fishing boats and lunge when sailors least expect them. Lightning on a stormy night, a whip-quick flash in the darkness, and he pins her to the rocks with an arm on either side of her chest.
 
"And you are the worst of them," he breathes, and it tastes of salt, and the young woman turns her head, baring her throat and waits. Once her instincts would have screamed, her heart pounded and fists tightened in self-defense, but things have changed. She is safer here than any other place in this world.
 
 "Is that why I fascinate you?" She is counting her own heartbeat pulsing in her windpipe. Always counting. She tracks the pounding of her own lifeblood, measures it like sand in an hourglass, and frets to find there is never enough. Anything less than always is nothing.
 
Rocks and ragged grass, crushed and pressing against her bared spine, and it would have helped to keep her coat, but it lies somewhere off among weeds where she threw it. There is no temperature here, and rare as it was to see any clouds. There were always stars and sky in summer evenings. She scrabbles for purchase at pebbles and dirt; the crickets are singing again.
 
There was a balance somewhere, or as close to the usual give-and-take compromise as man and not-man can achieve in this unusual acquaintanceship. The Outsider's skin warms where she touches it, and he shivers deliberately at fingertips brushing over his arms and ribs; real or not, neither of them care.
 
He likes the things that mark her as other to himself. Strange things, simple things; feigned irritation at the Outsider's unexpected manifestations, deliberate care where none is required-
 
“You don't understand," She tells him later, while her heart drums itself slowly back into steadiness and inquisitive fingers arrange her hair into odd shapes on the rocks. "All those things, they're human. You want to make me something more, but you don't know what kind of more I'll be."
 
What if you despise me, the winds whisper with hollow impertinence. What if I despise myself? She shivers, she knows that here the cold has nothing to do with it.
 
 Somewhere out on the water buoys bob and ropes billow; a whale suspended within the blues and reds sings a mournful song. The sky is just beginning to lighten.
 
"I cannot tell," the Outsider admits. His fingers don't stop their slow drag through her hair. "Every path I see for you is mortal; all else is veiled by the ripples and contours of the Void. The choice, in the end, must be your own."
 
"I don't know what I'm doing," She admits, watching pale green on the horizon, swallowing stars as it stretches, grows.
 
"Then we are equals already."
 
She shakes her head gently, enough to convey disapproval without discouraging the scalp massage. "You're not the one risking your life. Or soul, as the case may be."
 
The fingers tighten on a fistful of her hair, grip it just short of pain, and then let go. "No."
 
"So you would mourn then?" She searches the shadows for the Outsider's eyes, and when she finds them he does not look away.
"Does it matter, if you are not there to witness it?"
 
 "Yes," She says firmly, and the Outsider sighs. 
 
"I would mourn. I would drown the Isles in bitter ocean, and from the muted cries of the dying I would fashion you a shroud, and bury you in the darkest depths of the abyss. And then I would be very lonely." His lips twitch, the slightest hint of humor. "Better for everyone if you do not die."
 
Her breathing is slow, patient, like the tides; her lips taste of salt, as she always do here. The young woman pulls away when the shadows are no longer dark enough to obscure the individual blades of grass on which she lies.
 
"We'll see," she says quietly, and the choice is made.
 
Days pass with a pendulum's rhythmic monotony; dawn to day to dusk to night, the world moves on, and the young woman’s time is ending. The future looks interesting; she expects a good show.
 
Dawn light and the water ripples, shifts grey-blue-green around her waist, and inky black where it touches the Outsider. There should be cold, she knows distantly, and discomfort in the way her submerged clothes cling to her skin, but such things are a matter of choice, not necessity.
 
 The sun is pale where it rises and flushes the water white-gold; she still finds it beautiful, and that in itself is a comfort.
 
 A sea breeze blows her long black hair over her face. She pushes it aside, and smiles awkwardly at the Outsider.
 
"You know, I don't think you've looked away from me once since-" he falters when the words refuse to form and the resulting mess threatens to choke her. There's a black nothing in the back of her mind, barely noticeable except when she prods at it; coiled like a serpent, and it snaps if she pushes too hard. Wincing, she surrenders. It seems some memories are best left to rot.
 
"The change is a violent one," the Outsider says softly. "Traumatic and incomprehensible, like birth and death condensed into a single moment. I was not....certain of your survival."
 
"I'm fine," She assures. She sees now, clearer than before, and there is wonder in the Outsider's eyes, mingling with uncertainty and something touchingly close to worry.
 
The world is new and golden, and they are its center.
 
She reaches for the Outsider's hands, holds them in her own (and they are warm, he thinks, intentionally made so, and still for his benefit alone), and finds her throat too dry to speak. Some things, it seems, have not changed. If one day she attracts worshippers of her own they will not find her a loquacious deity.
 
Should there not be vows?" The Outsider tilts his head to eye her, as he does when he discovers something odd, something human that defies his understanding. Strange, to think that there will come a time, distant but plausible, when humans will have changed so much that the young woman will find herself unable to answer.
 
She understands what the Outsider is asking her, and it's a gift she never once expected.
 
"Do we need them?"
 
She looks down at their hands, still intertwined, and then beyond, at the water. It moves with the breeze and the tide but she can still make out their reflections. Shadows, swaying like dancers. She cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
 
 "They would please you," the Outsider says.
 
  Yes, she thinks.
 
"I didn't prepare any."
 
 "Spontaneity is always preferable to preparation."
 
She has no words for making vows, because all her vows have been given, not made. A vow was traditionally a matter of high tradition, lofty words and the dust of predecessors; you’d mean the vow. You would not make it, though you might recited them with the rest, and those you did not truly mean.
 
There were no vows involved in the-
 
but of course, she cannot think of that. 
 
The woman cannot make vows, any more than the sea can make wine, or the skies can make tears. Still, she tries.
 
"I vow..."
 
And what does she vow? She cannot offer to remain loyal through sickness and misfortune, when neither applies. What remains to be affirmed?
 
"I won't let go," she says at last. "I won't cease to exist, I won't be parted from you." Her voice firms as conviction grows; she lifts his chin, and what she says becomes simple truth. "I...forsake eternal rest, and whatever comes after, and I won't be made dust, or...consigned to the depths. I'll stay. Here, in the Void, both. Wherever you are."
 
Breathing is difficult; there's a pressure on her lungs, almost like suffocation. People weep at such occasions. She knows they do, and now she knows why. It feels a little like loss and a little like gain, a new weight in her mind and heart, a new absence of something she hasn't ever really acknowledged. She is almost as she was, except that she is more, and it aches distantly like thunder on the horizon.
 
In the end, it's as simple as drowning.
 
"You are the Outsider. And I am yours."