FLORENTINE

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Does he know that even the way he looks at her makes her ache? Infinity is in her essence, but her bones, her skin her sinew is so young. She is but the youth of a new day dawning compared to the millennia of sunrises and sunsets he has seen.
 
Her chin lowers but her gaze peers up at him from beneath her sweep of gilded hair and summer petals. Florentine listens to all he says and there is no smile when he calls her childlike. It may be a nail in the coffin of her youth and she nods again, agreement perfuse within her as her gaze slips away – better to hide the hurt that twinges there like a flickering light.
 
She might look up to the skies, to see the multitude stars and their clouds that drift idly by. Yet she does not, for she is so low to the ground, so heavy with her mortality (never has it felt so strong, so present). But she is heavy too with her regret. If she were not drowning in sorrow with her confidence stripped bare (like a beach after a great wave), Florentine might have smiled and shrugged his comment off. But now, in this moment, he condemns her with his words and like any sinner she nods and accepts his verdict with grace and poise.
 
Oh what a broken girl of gold she is.
 
His shoulder is friction against hers, his touch a comfort upon her neck, her cheek. The flower girl shivers for the touch of her flower boy and arches beneath it, content and sated, even as unease pools as lava within her - even as it builds volcanic and hot.
 
All falls to darkness as her eyes close with his vow, whispered into her ear. His laughter is an autumn breeze rustling her fringe and passing across her cheek in a caress.  “Then why did you become mortal if you were content without change?” And her lips press tight to the groove of his neck, where his pulse beats strong and bright. She knows how his pulse feels as life slips from him, as death comes creeping. She knows what it is to cry over a fallen god.
 
Silence falls thick and heavy. It sits upon her lungs and Flora takes a breath, deep, deep, feeling the sweet ache as her chest pushes out, out. Memories pass before her: her death, her birth, war, her future selves, her past selves and a million worlds that have known her. She is the traveller girl, the one whom Time can never pin down. “I am always changing.” Florentine whispers and where once she felt love and awe and strength for what she is, now she only wonders and questions. “I have died and been born so many, many times and each time I change something is different. Is that bad?” There she pauses. There the girl listens to the lapping of the lake and feels the pull of the moon. “You will die too now.” Florentine says, slowly a frission of worry sparking within her for there is no rebirth for a mortal boy.
 
Lysander looks to her and she does not shy away, she holds him there, in green and lilac and worry and wonder. “When you do I will not be able to find you in my next life, or any that follow.”
 
Her heart has grown to a crescendo in her lungs. Her eyes are blown wide, wide as they watch him. “Eternity seems dark without you. So maybe you are made to be still and I am made to change things.” At once her gaze is a fierce thing, bold and bright and strong. Yes, Florentine was made to make change and be changed and how many times has she dived into infinity just to alter a single moment?
 
We have all the time we need. His words are echoes in her mind. “Do we?” Her voice is a distant thing, her eyes still bright, still wide as the universe above them. “Do you want to die?” The girl who has died over and over for an eternity asks her fallen-god who has never died once.




@Lysander

FLORENTINE

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Being with Lysander is both easy and hard. Away from him, a part of her aches, beside him, another part does too. For he is a challenge, he reveals the parts of her she works so hard to hide – from herself, from others. He knows her completely and she stirs, uneasy with such revelation, and yet, content too.
 
His laughter stirs her mane and breathes across the gold of his skin. Despite her ache she turns into his embrace – a sunflower toward its sun.
 
This talk of theirs, of eternities and losses, weighs her heart so low. Her chest throbs with the effort of keeping her heart aloft. But Florentine does not shy from it, not when she is made from endless nights and unnumbered days, not when her existence is a strange and unworldly thing.
 
Lysander speaks of being remade and she knows that, oh how she knows death and rebirth. But does she know of how he is remade, over and over? She wets her lips, for they are dry – dry with worry for their talk of his eternal death. Her skin, still damp with the lake’s midnight water, is cold as ice, but she does not feel it. Not when he warms one side of her with his, not when she looks to the green of him and thinks of all the verdant worlds they might miss.
 
“Mmm.” Flora hums like bells, the tips of her wings brushing the grasses at their feet. The meadow smells are rich and warm and sweet upon her tongue. As she relishes the meadow sweet, she considers his words and wonders all the ways you can be unmade in order to be remade. Her skull tilts, her chin lifts and she gazes at the angle of his jaw from beneath the heavy veil of her fringe. “I do not know, Lysander…” How can you ever ask a boy who has never died if being unmade is something akin to death? Florentine supposed, in many ways, it likely was.  And not once more that night does she wonder why it is that he knows her so well.
 
Her lips smile with his laughter, her eyes gleam as her nose nudges his chin. “Never.” Florentine breathes more truth into that one word than she has the whole of her life.  Her smile is gone now and Lysander’s laughter is carried away upon the breeze. She hears its echo in the mountains and sighs but says nothing for already she has noticed the change in him, the change in herself. His heart at once is faster, it thrills in his veins and her own heartbeat rises in answer.
 
Home.
 
She lays aside her own questions of where her home is (for without crowns and with so many of her family strewn through the worlds she cannot name all the places she wishes to call home). But for Lysander there is just one place and it is not here. Her breath is trapped within her lungs that strain.
 
“Only if I can sleep beneath the stars with the anthousai.”




@Lysander