{ paris thorne } // d4 fin

Oh, and how Paris has fallen.

Your lips grazed against the torrents of salted water that sprayed thickly against its flesh, waves crashing across the rocks below and leaving the space around your frame coated in a distinct residue. A liquid that had the power to either envelope you in a a caress made out of feasible affection and desperation.

Or an embrace that squeezed around your vital organs like a vice. Almost as if it were melding your stoic ribcage and stabbing each individual bone further into your sternum; piercing the skin of your lungs-- catching against your innards and leaving you breathless. Agonizingly breathless.

It raged like a fire beneath your skin, ravaging your throat and gradually travelling towards your brain. The constant, overwhelming crushing pain that soon made itself present almost forced your jaws open, baring your insides in all their vulnerability to those maiming.

That little inkling in the back of your mind soon became no more than a flurry of bubbles, clawing desperately towards the surface.

Breathe, Paris, Breathe.

You didn't.

It started with The Sea.

As it always had. It began with The Sea when I skittered down their slick-covered rocks, ankles losing contact with the muddled algae and seaweed with every passing step, desperation bleeding into every nook and cranny of my very being because it wasn't the truth, they swore, they promised (and they wheezed to him on their dying breaths aswell) that they were coming home this time, every time. Because although it had begun with The Sea and The Earth, the waters pooling at my sock-clad feet hadn't harmed a single Thorne since our birth into these worlds. Suddenly the horizon-line was slanting into a vertical position and agony thrummed throughout my veins and torment spilt from my palms into the rubble and shells that conjoined with the splinters in my palms and ripped them anew. My torment was diluted crimson that mingled with the tantalizing waters below and seeped into the bone marrow of my everything and oh god it burned because I knew, I knew.

Torment spilled from my eyes and my heart and my hands, my cold, shaking hands. The Sea wailed against the rocks around me almost as if in nonverbal violent apology, glistening with ushered tears that shimmered all around me. The more that I refused, that I bashed my fists into the submerged sands and that I keened; the more The Ocean revamped it's attempts, tides gravitating towards me as if I were The Moon.

And I was.

I was The Moon, in a pitch-black night sky. I was empty and hollow because when I rose with the Horizon one faithful morning at four and a half The Ocean had drowned them; they'd drowned my Stars and left me by myself to wail in my indescribable loneliness like a Banshee (even though there was a Siren that coo'ed and called at my doorstep for me to come back to The Sea; that Father was still there, in the salt and in the blood) because four and a half had stolen my Parents and with them a chunk of my poor, sickening excuse of a heart (because my body was made of eighty percent of water and water was a thief and a murderer) and so The Moon became a Banshee.

And though Frances-Mae sang in tongues of freedom and living combustion, I screamed.

My lungs bursted and my eyes still had torment seeping from every crevice, but my throat and vocal cords never gave way as I screeched into the night, pulverizing the barriers of surrealism and tell-tale and leaving room for an earth-shattering anguish that gripped my body tighter than the water had my lungs.

In that moment I knew. Whenever I peered up at the night sky, that bellowing sound would echo back.

"Je remue le ciel, le jour, la nuit
Je danse avec le vent, la pluie
Un peu d'amour, un brin de miel."

And perhaps The Sea was not my forte.

Perhaps Frances-Mae is right. Perhaps all the nights spent in silent disappointment at my clear, and intangible dislike for ocean water is her way of saying grow. Rise. Become stronger. Taste not the scent of sea salt but the underlying message of freedom. (but there was no freedom in the way they scratched at their bared throats and how their lungs tore in two. we both know that.) 

But, perhaps also, I am free.

Maybe not in the same way as her. Though we share identical plain-jane blue eyes and freckles like constellations scattered billions of light years apart-- though seem as if there is only a fingertip of space between them, (and perhaps Frances-Mae and I are stars now. apart. yet so close) barely recognizable beneath the maroon eye-bags and pallor skin that was the weight of my nightmares.

Perhaps other people dream in the length of shadows crossing over library floor and book pages, in how the tides pull closer towards shore with every phase the moon offered.

But I. I dreamt in breathless agony. And I measured my days in the wads of dough that crawled beneath the skin of my forearms and plagued my elbows. 

(Not miles crossed in ocean water. Not the amount of bait lost and fishes wrought to the surface. Not living combustion, not freedom, not bravery and definitely not Frances-Mae.)

I dreamt in nights spent alone on hills at four and a half in the morning. The gentle, nerve-wracking sound of waves pulling back from shore and colliding it's tides into land sevenfold (it made bile rise in my throat and blood boom in my ears, but it's okay, because I can't drown in dirt and I can't drown in dough) and I dreamt of a scream that seemed to etch itself into the stars above, into the moon and into the banshee's wail.

My rage. My fury. My torment.

(My freedom, too.)