It should be dark in the kitchen. The dawn is still buried below the horizon, the lights inside dowsed. There isn't even the dull red illumination of heat on the stovetop coils, or in the guts of the oven.
What there is, instead, is a pale impossibility: a localized aurora, a sheen of ionized particles drifting in slow blue-white, half-real ribbons around the black-clad figure sitting at the kitchen island with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. A starker blue radiates from his eyes into the cool darkness of the room, shining out like the beacon of a lighthouse as he looks at nothing in particular. Besides the rise and fall of his even breath, he's motionless.
Paul hears footsteps. He straightens his back. He doesn't turn to the door.
(She told him to stay away. He should have. No matter where he looks in the black seas of the coming moments, he still can't find what to say to her to make that right.)
"Gideon," he says, with a hundred strangers' tongues, (with a hundred strangers' empty hearts, with a hundred strangers' distance), "It's me."
March 2nd; Gideon
What there is, instead, is a pale impossibility: a localized aurora, a sheen of ionized particles drifting in slow blue-white, half-real ribbons around the black-clad figure sitting at the kitchen island with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. A starker blue radiates from his eyes into the cool darkness of the room, shining out like the beacon of a lighthouse as he looks at nothing in particular. Besides the rise and fall of his even breath, he's motionless.
Paul hears footsteps. He straightens his back. He doesn't turn to the door.
(She told him to stay away. He should have. No matter where he looks in the black seas of the coming moments, he still can't find what to say to her to make that right.)
"Gideon," he says, with a hundred strangers' tongues, (with a hundred strangers' empty hearts, with a hundred strangers' distance), "It's me."
"Don't be afraid."