☾

It is growing easier to be touched. Yet Leonidas still cannot help the way his heart leaps when her muzzle touches his neck in turn, when he leans from her a small way. It is instinct, it is a lack of touch for much of his life that keeps him flighty and nervous. Though the press of her muzzle to his neck is warm, welcome, and puts a smile to his lips, still the shape of his mouth is tentative, shy.


The wild-wood boy feels the tall oaks at his back, standing, watching when she asks if this is his home. His head tilts, curious. “I have no home,” The fae-boy says lightly. He means it too. The truth is imprinted upon his feet that roam and roam and roam in search of the place that feels like home. But none have ever been… right. The woods are the most comfortable but so too is spending time with those who draw him in like magnets: Nic, Apsara, Maeve and Maret. They all have become a comfortable place. Leonidas thinks of his uncle, how Asterion had whispered that they are family, had asked to stay by his nephew’s side. Leonidas agreed, but had seen him scarce times since. 


A costume, he repeats back to her upon a whisper as he thinks of her ribbons, her fire. Leonidas knows now what a costume is, he has seen so many of them that night. But he looks to Maeve and the way the light gleams gold upon the white of her face, “Are you sure?” The boy’s nose wrinkles, a frown tipping up between his leonine eyes that trail across her young, delicate face. The boy did not think he had seen a girl more fitting of a phoenix than Maeve. Though, granted, he had never seen a phoenix before…


Then she asks him to paint her.


He stares at the brush and the paints, his ember eyes glowing as they flit to glance at those around them. They all seem to be creating beautiful pieces upon their subjects but Leonidas has never painted before. He looks up to Maeve and wonders how he might create such beautiful pieces - would his body know how? Could he control his telekinesis in such a way to draw sweeping curves like flames, like-  


not too fiery, Maeve whispers and Leonidas holds her gaze, still and curious. “But you are a phoenix.” Leonidas says and wonders how a girl made of fire can ever be afraid of it. But maybe fear is healthy, he has run from fire before. Yet he has seen how the forest has recovered from amidst the ash of its fire-wound. Life grew back, more vibrant, more alive, healthier. 


Tentatively he lifts the brush, presses it into the paint as he has seen others do and lifts it. The wild-wood boy begins at her brow and as it sweeps down the bridge of her nose and away across the space between her cheek and her lips, he wonders if the paint feels cold, or wet, or strange at all. He is slow, quiet, deliberate. Silence hangs, broken only by the loud laughter, the crackling fire. Leonidas ignores it all, focussing upon the path the paint makes across her skin and the contours of her delicate face. He nearly misses her apology as he begins to fall into the dance, the pattern of painting, the rhythm. Still quiet, still shy, he pauses as paint curls beneath her eye and along her jaw. “Yes,” He confesses, sounding so much like a boy and then deep as a man when he murmurs, “But it is easy to forget when I am concentrating.”


And he does concentrate, with a frown across his brow and the sweep of his ebony lashes heavy and full of shadow as his gold eyes look up, focussed upon the path of his brush across Maeve’s face.


@Maeve 
“Speaking.”