if you reviewed then you should probably know that you are in yourself a good 23% of the reason this update is in perceivable existence and also that i may love you ok now you know.

shall we continue.

ahem.

…

we are like boats passing in the night
particularly you.

…

I have no idea where we're going and Raffe is putting extra effort into being an annoying bastard by keeping it that way. In other words, his mighty seraphicness will not deign to speak to me.

Because he is, as I said, an annoying bastard.

A game at which, as any animate thing unfortunate enough to overhear us will miserably tell you, two can play.

"Hey, Raffe, is it worrying that my – your – sword talks to me in my sleep? And how bad is it that I find her weirdly attractive?"

"Hey, Raffe, why does paper beat rock in rock-paper-scissors? Because I'm pretty sure if someone tried to kill you with a brick you wouldn't really care whether or not it was in an envelope…? Thumb-wars are better. Have a thumb-war with me. Raffe."

"Hey, Raffe, why do you think that coyote from the Road Runner cartoons blew all his cash on the heavy duty explosives instead of, like, selling them to a cartel and buying himself dinner with the blood money?"

"Hey, Raffe, what colour does a smurf turn when we choke it?"

"Hey, Raffe. Hey. Hey, Raffe. Raffe. Raffe, hey."

"Hey, Raffe."

Nothing.

Not so much as a, 'Shut up, Penryn, oh my God.'

Really now.

Every so often I'd lean forward as we walked, ducking in front of him to get a good look at his expression. My continued findings were that he didn't actually have one. I mean, I was used to Raffe being all self-absorbed and distant, but this… it was the face of a captured soldier awaiting enemy interrogation. A more poetic mind than mine might call it 'stone-faced,' but this particular mind is in fact mine and so I'll just tell you it creeped me right the hell out.

He doesn't even seem irritated with me, which is how I really know something is grievously, cosmically out of whack.

I pull back with a huff. I stop moving altogether.

Raffe doesn't so much as check his pace.

After a few stalled moments, I, being Penryn, inevitably dash to catch up with him.

Another three minutes (and I know because I'm counting) of silence trickle between us like leftover drops of condensation tracing unsurely down a glass pane. I think, Whatever, and hip-check him into a bush – or try to; he doesn't shift an inch.

He would've humoured me with that, before. What exactly it is that happened to slash such a cold line to separate our (comparatively fuzzy) Before to this perversely quiet, rocky Now is still unknown, and will be so long as Raffe keeps acting like he's the cool kid on the playground and I'm an overly persistent imaginary friend.

I swear to God I am this close to moving into the Are We There Yets. This close.

…

you will always be in my heart
in my mind
and in your grave.

…

As the day was dragged along before us like a weighted, silent corpse, I felt a little queasy at the saccharine decay that leaked through the evening. The last hours of colour were so bright the world seemed to be more of a backstreet-anti-depressant-cheerful edit of itself, complete with gratuitous saturation and a cheap glow-y filter. I was a little offended on my misery's behalf (if live background tracks from Three Days Grace were still unavailable even in times of bewildered loneliness, surely a girl deserved some suitable cloud cover?). But, alas, the sun bobbed its patient goodbye and the skies continued to glow loud and over-vivid as if to compensate for our bubble of impermeable gloom; all the better to look down on the bleakness it blanketed and tut to itself, I suppose.

I don't stream this thought to Raffe like I might have. I'd given up throwing words at him what must be hours ago, lapsing into a semblance of quiet and shooting thoughts into the side of his head like I was Superman and my sulking indignance was laser beams. (To no reaction from His Holiness, rest assured.) At least I was trying.

I glared until my eyes watered.

I sighed pointed sighs until I felt dizzy.

Raffe walked. I walked.

The sky unfurled as parched inkpaper, eagerly soaking up the dip of minutes to become an ordinarily ridiculous kind of contrast. Behind us, heavens smoothly chalked in violet held languorously drifting clouds, cotton-candy pink with bellies fat and golden from the sun's sleepy farewell. In front, a wide open canvas of whole and fathomless blue, deep and cool enough to make the oceans roil with envy. The world above was absorbed in a war of sorts, this palette of unnecessary colours charging to overrun one another, slow as thickened honey leaking though a fractured jar, but charging nonetheless.

When the swathe of evening sky had burned to navy, seeped dark into the very pores of the earth and swallowed up everything from the clouds to the uppermost tree branches into its inviting velvet, I barely have time to register how little I noticed the demon-wings when they were attached to Raffe before he's thrown them open and launched into the air.

I reel backwards from shock, and the solid wall of wind buffeted from the power behind that leap sends me over the rest of the way, sprawling to the dirt with my gasp snatched from my mouth and then forced back down my oesophagus like a startled rabbit. I'm choking and sputtering and wiping the sting from my eyes and by the time I've half-gathered myself, enough to jerk back my head and cast about wildly in search, Raffe is gone.

The world is blacker than black, too dark too distinguish a far-off angel's form from that of a slightly closer bird. Probably too dark to distinguish either, anyway. Real, flat, dark.

I look into it anyway. Of course I do.

Even after my brain recovers from the shock, a stalled engine revving slightly and reminding my lungs that there was no immediate threat, no need for all this silly over-oxygenated shuddering, and to calm down, please, and telling me that my eyes were not adapted for honing in on flying prey at nighttime by only the liar-lights of a few scattered stars. I curse them. My brain takes it in stride.

It's a few beats more before I even think of yelling, "Hey!" at the top of my traitor lungs, but only a millisecond after I think the thought I do it proud.

And only an instant later, I recall that it is the apocalypse and monsters rule this earth and it is dark and I am alone and now every beastie within a hundred yard radius would know it. My scream echoes through the forest, and I cringe like it's nails on a chalkboard and think, Shutthefuckupohmigod.

I'm being irrational. Me.

It's weird that Raffe and I seemed to operate whose turn it was to be maladjusted on a rota.

Raffe.

I know with an ice-cold set to my bones that absolutely nothing about this is rational. Not even for us. And I thought the world made no sense before.

I almost put my head in my hands, I almost squeeze shut my eyes against the burn of confused, furious nearly-tears. I don't because, I reiterate, it's dark and in this new world I am almost always prey, and I am loathsomely terrified.

I feel half like a chicken who claws its way out of the pot she's been marinating in only to wander into a den of starving foxes, and half like a little kid who's lost their parent in a pressing crowd of strangers.

I press my back into a tree and count my breaths with my eyes wide open. I stay there until my pulse has to choose between causing me to go into cardiac arrest or kindly slowing the hell down; I stay against that tree until I've separated every layer of sound from the hissing, creaking, snapping blanket of forest whispers, put a source to every fragment of noise; until I could draw the chance pattern of bark under my hands with perfect accuracy.

The sky stays clear. Get's darker.

I pick an unknown direction and, numbly, I walk in it.

I don't know how long for. It only felt like a very, very long while.

I don't know exactly how long it takes for him to find me for the second time in as many days.

But I know there's nothing silent about him now.

He crashes out of the sky as though he's been shot down, those lethal wings screaming against the air and swallowing up the moon. His mad fall slices through unlucky branches with creaks and snaps and whipping splinters as viciously as a bullet through bones. He lands without properly considering his legs and buckles slightly when he apparently orders them to move before they touch the floor.

I barely have time to notice this, don't have time to think/feel most the allotted stuff I might – what's that shadow (dread); an angel (fear)?; sword kill grab your sword (relief); …that's Raffe ( – ) – before he's…

He lurches over the ground between himself and my completely frozen body and then he's… holding me.

The sudden heat of him and the surprised tangle of our legs forces me back, stumblingly pliant, until I'm pressed to a tree for the second time that night. My hands had reflexively gone to his chest, although I couldn't tell you whether they wanted to shove away or pull closer here, and because of that I know that this time it's his heart that needs the help slowing. It jolts unevenly against my palms, both of them, the hum stuttering through his entire chest like some angry fist pounding out a rhythmless beat too strong, too fast to be human. Even only pressed against it, I feel like my chest is bruising from the assault.

It takes me a few seconds to focus on his breathing, barely any slower than his heartbeat and ragged as though he'd run a marathon. It's sending hot embers curling across my throat. Raffe's face is in my neck and he's gasping into me as though I'm oxygen and he's a drowning man.

Distantly I realise I'm not even sure how this position is working, since I'm so damned short and he's epitome-of-literal-heavenly-perfection tall. And then I notice that my feet aren't on the ground. He's holding me really, really tightly. I tell him so.

He jerks back immediately. I would have dropped if not for the fact that Raffe doesn't actually move back far enough to give me room, and still I've barely caught up against him before he's there again like some kind of reluctant magnet. His hands, careful now, re-snake around my waist fleetingly only to run up my ribs and down again, ghosting over my hips and almost, almost hitching up behind my knees before retreating, just skimming the hem of my shirt on the way up – are those hands shaking? – and their lightest insistence has my arms looped around his neck before he follows the circuit again. He can't seem to decide the best place for his hands, so he's choosing everywhere.

I can't think, and I know that isn't the reason the world seems to make less and less sense with every passing minute. (So long as we're making a list, I can't breathe, either, and it's only half because of the solid weight that binds me into a tree and more to do with who was doing the binding.)

I blink, hard, and manage to lever a few tenuous inches of breathing space between us. I try to bob around and get a look at Raffe's face – I can't begin to imagine an expression to go with this, least of all from him – but he seems determined to keep it firmly hidden at my throat. The sliver of clear air between us works like a wash of cool water seeping through my tired skin. I barely hear my startled, rabbit-quick breaths slow unnoticed under his ragged gasping which is taking him longer to rein in. I haven't seen Raffe's celestial-fit form betray him like this since that one bleak night where he believed he had watched me die.

I've already called that there is something very wrong here, but believe me when I tell you it's worth repeating.

Raffe's hands aren't just touching. They're kneading me. Squeezing along my arms at precise intervals as though he half-expects my bones to crumble under his presses.

I have no idea what to do with this Raffe anymore than I would with one who eviscerated small animals or would only wear clothes of tangerine latex.

So very carefully, I drop my hands to hover over his. They still immediately. More careful still, like I'm dealing with a skittish creature rather than a man(-shaped being), I trail my own hands up over the sinews of his arms, his shoulders, curl my palms at his throat and press back until I can see his face. His eyes are shut tight as is in deep concentration. Unsure and probably a liar, I say, "Hey. It's alright."

He laughs once, pitched high, and it's the saddest sound I've ever heard. I watch tendons jump as Raffe works his jaw in an attempt to grind out further involuntary outburst.

"You were gone," he manages eventually. His voice is so quiet I have to strain to hear it, so quiet I'm half-sure he doesn't want me to. "Penryn. I lost you."

"Uh, yah," I reply, throwing a loose fist into his stomach (and decidedly choosing not to notice the way he recoils as though expecting the force of a wrecking ball). He steps back. I'm glad, I tell myself, I can think clearer now. "That kinda happens when you fly of into the frickin' sunset and leave me behind."

He back-steps again, jerkily. Looks down to obscure a curious, shadowed twisting in his face. "I'm- I'm very – sorry." He sounds strange. Constricted, almost.

Still I've not quite forgiven him for abandoning me in a more-than-likely cannibal infested forest in the pitch dark all by lonesome. I lock my own jaw. "You better not make it a habit, Raffe."

"No, no," he says reflexively.

Eyes narrowed, I look down my nose at him. "Promise you'll walk."

To where? I don't know. But damn if he's not taking me with him.

And Raffe looks at me. Really looks. His eyes are abruptly flat, reflecting the cold moonlight like the surface of a still lake might, the depths as obscured and unreadable as they would have been in our Before. That unmovable gaze scans over me boot to hair and sends hailstones skittering through my limbs. He darts a look to the upward northeast. Back at me. Repeats the process.

"Raffe." Now I sound strange.

He doesn't blink, but those eyes squeeze painfully shut. Needing to shatter something – the lull, this spell, that awful stillness – I sidestep brusquely.

"Raf-"

His eyes snap open. "I promise."

I stall. "You'll… stay with me?" Immediately I want to suck the words back; they came out wrong, too soft too soft–

"Yes." He swallows. "Yeah. Penryn. I'm with you."

And I nod. Awkward at the rough tenor of his syllables as they spill into the unstirred night air, at the raptor focus he still has on my face as though he's waiting for me to crack open or try to crack him open at any second, I say, "Alright."

And we walk.

…

when we first met, you were pretty, and i was lonely.
now i am pretty lonely.

…

well then.

(feedback = fixing = deep soul-lifting joy = motivation = further verbal scribblings. if you're, like, interested. or something.)