Incubus

by Willow-wode

It would take you from me.

The daylight sees it gleaming, nested against your skin.  In the twilight you curl your fingers about it and close your eyes, bow your head beneath its weight.  Mid-nights you lie with it, murmurs of need and abandon touch your lips and you gasp, held in its embrace, quivering as it rises within you, too large for your skin to hold.

Once it was me lying there.  Once it was my whispers that drove you past the edge of need, my arms that cradled you when we lay so close we were all one breath and being, my hands that gentled soft eyes and hard flesh.   I still hold close to you, say your name when your gaze grows too flat, touch you and shield you as I can.  Yet it’s not near enough, is it?  Not enough to satisfy me, not enough to protect you.  I’m helpless before it and now there’s no place for me in you without the fear.  Both of us, afraid.   You, fearing what it would bring to me.   Me, fearing of what it would force on you.

I’m losing you.  Bit by bit, I watch it take you from me.  More and more I watch you turn away…

You have another lover, now… as if it would know anything about love.  It claims you.  It tortures you.  Every hour you’re forced to soothe it and dally with it and submit to its whims and keep it just enough at arms length so it doesn’t encompass you.  In turn that jealous piece of wretchedness binds you further, claims you with sick desire, with pain and power.  It holds no love for me.  It knows that you were mine.  Once…

Once you were lithe and quick, as unaware of your own elegance as anyone I’ve ever seen.   You didn’t just walk anywhere—you’d be confident, chin up, eager and willing to move into the next space.  There was that much to you that I never grew tired of watching, whether it was dancing at the seasoning parties, or swimming in the river like the rest of those crazy Brandybucks, or ably angling a scythe in the hayfields, or pacing slowly toward me in the quietness of your room, clad in nothing but dark hair and candlelight.

But now that grace has become a wary, hunching stumble—a stagger against rock, a hesitant foothold, a shaky lurch forward.  There are times you reel, listing sideways like a drunkard and all that saves you is a panicky clutch outward and my hands on you.  I catch you, stop you from falling and you shrink from my touch, then lean into me with a sob of weakness.   And I hold you, my own tears hot upon my cheeks because I remember what you were…

Once you were so fair, so fine and gentle as to make my heart burst with the aching.  Soft curls tangling in my palms, glinting russet in the sun.   Skin gleaming ivory as we read together by the fire’s light, flushed autumn-rose with the morning as you sat in your window and watched me working in the garden.  Lips crumpled against the pillow, or couched in a stubborn pout, or curving in a shy, crooked smile, or parted and gasping my name beneath me. 

Now that lovely mouth is marred with the marks of your own teeth settling into them.  Your cheeks are sunken and filthy, your jaw tensed in constant denial, dark tendrils of hair lank and faded, skin sallow and chapped with windburn and weather.  Never enough proper flesh on you in the best of fall plenty, now I can see the bones starting to stare through skin and, more telling, the once-smooth cords of your neck torn and bruised and burned by what you’re chained to.  The touch of fingers, the soothing balm of kisses, neither can ease any of it away.

Once your hands were smooth, quick and agile and oddly strong, unwilling to hold too tightly to anything unless it were, perhaps, a book.  Those nimble fingers were hopeless in the garden; they’d kill plants quicker than an early frost.  But they could wield a pen with uncanny ease, could set to make music with drum or a pipe, could dance over my body like a storm then gentle me down and glide over me as if I was made of finest silk.

Now your poor hands shake and quaver, roped with veins and dry bone like some ancient crone’s.  Sometimes you can barely hold food and water in your grasp without your grip betraying you; once you threw your cup at the fire, and swore, and sank down, covering your face with those trembling hands.  The only thing you clutch at with any strength or surety is that miserable thing…

And your eyes…  that’s the worst of it.  Once they were brilliant and changeable as rainwater, so deep I was in constant fear of drowning and only your presence to save me.  Sparked with mischief, dancing with laughter, alight with passion—you held your heart… nay, your soul!… close and vivid in your eyes.  You held my soul in your eyes.

Now all too often, they hold instead a wild witch-gleam.  Or shimmer with tears of despair.  Addled bewilderment, fierce determination, ragged futility, white-hot fever pitch—they all shift and replace themselves in your gaze.  There’s a desolate indentation fixed between your dark brows, set in a never-ending denial.

Oh, Frodo… Once you were strong.  All whipcord and mettle, edged delicate and poised as some elven-forged blade.  You were stubborn, as well; all too often refusing to let anyone lift your load even when it was far too much for you—and when you did let me put shoulder to whatever you’d determined to take, it was with a patient amusement that bluntly told me you were humoring me, nothing more.  We both knew this game, played it even better.  You refused to go down; more, you’d not go down easy.

Now you still refuse to go down easy.  That stubborn strength burns inward like a slow kindling fire, desperate and frightened as your outward strength is riven from you.  Now your arms tremble when you lift your pack, sweat drips into your eyes before we’ve gone two miles.  As you sleep, stunned and exhausted, I weep with both despair and pride.  I play our old game, but it’s serious and desperate now.  I stay near, put my shoulder to you, this time.  I pretend little things to halt us on the road: a thorn in my foot, a shifting of my load—anything that will enable you a short respite.  I sneak from your pack what I can to spare you; now you carry nigh onto an empty bag, but still you stagger beneath the load.

At least you still trust me.

But now, not satisfied with taking your body from me, it wants that trust as well.  It whispers dark suspicion into your thoughts, plants tainted seeds in your heart.  I can see it at times, in the way you look at me if I get too close.  And I don’t know what I’ll do if it takes from you that last proof, that last remaining thread of what we shared.  Before.

Hold on, Frodo.  Don’t let it take you from me.  Dream softly in the dark and hold to that bright burning behind your eyes.  You have to keep trusting me.  You have to…

Once you were pure, and so full of light it would blind me.  Once you were beautiful.

But now, somehow, even as it burns you away and reduces you to naught but strangled passion and purpose and will….

Somehow, you still are.