her soul pulsed indigo and sickly yellow.
heda woke in the night, searching for
@Ava Amara, panicked, panicked until she could touch her daughter's face, assure herself of the girl's breath, that she lived, that she was real.
was she awake? she did not know.
ava jolted awake by the reaching touch of heda. then den swirled in her vision, what little light afforded came in stringlike beads along her periphery.
she turned to mama wordlessly, feeling Ana’s sleeping spine wedged against her back. the warmth was familiar — comforting even — but why had mama woken?
there was no answer to the unasked question. heda lay down beside ava, facing her, putting an arm over the sleepy shoulder to reassure herself further.
she blinked, suddenly quite awake in the gloom. "i think about sweetharbor every day. do you ever want to go back, ava?"
for a moment it is just their bodies in the dark; warm to the touch, close.
ava looked at heda in full, beholding her mama's thinned features, darkened by stress. for a long while she just looked, memorizing every line as it undulated and wavered -- but then she came to, and sighed.
it was unloving a thing as ava had ever thought: no, i do not want to go back.
but she knew the past would never let mama go.
never.
in the darkness heda lay down, cradling close to ava as if the girl is only a newborn again, and as if being a wife and a mother was all that the red-nape knew.
and they'd dream like that, just like that, if god was merciful for eight consecutive hours.
she settled into the familiar crook of her mother’s arm; it’s as familiar as the pace of her breathing, the scent of her breath, the bound of her pulse, the rhythm of her chest as it rose and fell.
but the silence is different. ava could not know the demons heda kept at bay in her mind, any more than her mother could glance into the alien world of her daughter’s thoughts. these realms were separated by more than membrane and viscera; heda’s world of a merciful god and righteous living, ava’s world of cold logic and godless creatures — separated by a distance more endless than the cold between stars.