title: we drank, oblivious / creation is a longer kind of drowning
characters: lakshmi bai, daryl dixon, dishonored au
warnings: unreality, drowning, water based death, madness

after six feet, all quiet is death quiet / six feet down / this far down / he doesn’t have a voice / dead men don't. / he’s a hunter slow, quiet, low, on his knees, crawling through the river-filth /

( his prey is oracle irony in rotten, writhing, burning flesh, his pray is Gods, his pray is things no man dares but he never cared about dares, he only did )

he sets his bait well: him, open mouthed, waiting to drown / as he lowers himself down, down, down, and she drags her fingers over his lips, her thumb calloused in wars / centuries old and still fresh / bait taken, trap unleashed and she shivers / fair / she takes his voice, he takes her sight / and together they rock together in holy quiet / he binds her eyes in riverweeds and sea grass / lets her trace him in numb-blind infinities / her thumb that catches across the curve of his mouth / the sulk below his lip that is rock pool deep where he hides his secrets / where he pulls his expressions that are only grimaces and never pleasures / except where no one can see / ( that he makes sure she can’t, does that mean they are all hers? ) / he’s asking her if he’s going to drown / if he’s mad / she says yes, both, both / fingers framed to temple / he is drowning and mad, haven’t he heard them whisper? / a man that talks to grass-bottomed puddles like they’ll answer him / looking for an embrace in the shallow waters that lap at his ankles like lovers’ hand in hand / encroaching. / sweeping him off his feet and / down, down, down / there is depths here my love, love enough to be depths, depths enough to drown / drowning men don’t need to talk,

( she opens her mouth against his, and the water rushes to sand, and between them, the shore crashes to life, out of shivering cold death, life, she rocks, life, she bleeds, life, he tastes and so too he knows how to devour and she's so hazy on the birth of continents after the centuries but she thinks that it must have always been like this )

/ they have better uses / their lungs are becoming new homes / their lungs are becoming a place for salt and brine and fish that are dull and shimmering, small enough to make rivers out of arteries inside of him / and she finds her home in there / that space expanding between bones like bird build bowers between tree branches / she builds her palace in his drowning / there love, if she kisses him it is not in life saving breath / it’s in siren pulled damp / and it is quiet, quiet, quiet / six feet deep, so quiet, he can forget and she can make sure he never does anything but remember / that she thinks, is better than speech / and he, her ragged hunter, her drowning bower / does not have the words to refuse her anymore.

( these waters will never give back what they have taken )