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+---- Thread: [P] [coronation] with words i have no balance (/showthread.php?tid=5963)
[coronation] with words i have no balance - Andras - 12-22-2020
AND I KNOW THAT ROME WASN'T BURNT IN A DAY
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
H
e would love to say he’s been staring this down, and oncoming train howling into the distance, the ghost of a machine barely visible through the fog. Maybe it is because he has his head in a well full of snakes and honey, the one soft, harmless place in the beating drum of his heart. Maybe it is the distance, Andras closed in the library until the day he is called to come back to the court for the coronation. Maybe it is that when he looks at Ipomoea he is busy seeing everything but this, like Po is a series of photographs, but none of them the king in his entirety.Through the ceremony, Andras is quiet, and still; no crackling light, no electric hum. He feels numb, almost empty. He is unprepared to cope with the nuances of his heart (the only thing pounding in his ears louder than the celebratory drums, the only thing brighter than the poppies unfolding like palms as the morning fog burns away) so he doesn’t.
He will unpack this all later, he decides. He will choose what to feel when he knows what it is.
Later comes in minutes, then hours, when he sees Danaë in the center of the garden, just for a moment free of the throng of well-wishers and citizens only now brave enough to peek at her and Isolt now that she is their queen.
Andras swallows the rest of his drink and carries the empty glass with him toward the young unicorn, turning it over as he searches for something-- anything-- to say. He thinks, not for the first time, that her father’s faith in his diplomacy is misplaced at best, catastrophic at worst.
It is strange, after all this time, to look at someone and see so many parts of a person you love: the angle of the brow, the red eyes, and not know who this new, different version of them is. It is strange to look at a face and not know if it is the face of a friend or a stranger.
Some things are like that, he supposes. Our faces are reborn, again and again, in those of our children. It is a path paves with moments like this, in the bustle of the garden, where, for just a second, around them it is quiet-- almost too much so.
Andras stares at her one second longer, and ducks his head low. ”Congratulations,” he says. ”I am here if you need me.”
ANDRAS demyan
RE: [coronation] with words i have no balance - Danaë - 12-22-2020
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
The quiet feels like an eden of moonlight instead of flowers. The fireflies have finally returned to the garden, lulled in perhaps by the lack of spectral music this deep into the night. Around her head they dance in patterns of constellations she remembers learning the stories off. In them she can see a sword driving through the darkness towards a dragon’s belly and a bow pulled taunt and true. Several other patterns of them dance through the empty spirals of her horn as if they are seeking pollen and vine instead of night.
Danaë closes her eyes as the insects and shadows gather around her in designs that flowers, and moss, and sunlight never will. In that blackness she slips into Hati’s mind, seeing the cracks in the forest as he does and wondering even as she stands still as marble in the garden how no one has noticed the worlds waiting there before. Her heart trembles at the thought and struggles to recall how to sing like a lark instead of roar like a hunting wendigo.
It is Andras that rouses her from the realm of waiting and hungry worlds. It is the look in his eyes that reminds her that the fireflies have only just returned to Delumine’s heart. And for a moment, as she blinks back the last remains of the forest cracks she can see him looking at her not through the flowers and quiet eden of the garden but through one of those cracks where wanting and rabid things wait.
Danaë thinks it would suit him.
In the distance Hati snarls at an obsidian grave rising through the dirt and his antlers scrap the moss from a spruce as he runs. “I will,” she says in a whisper, unsure if she’s saying I will to Andras or to the moonlight as it starts to fill with sound, and song, and a universe of fireflies instead of a constellation.
She tries to remember how her father seemed when the court came to call. She tries to remember how to be a flower instead of spore when she dips her head back towards him in greeting. But her horn still angles towards his heart before it runs back through the moonlight. Her mouth still does not move into a smile. When she blinks back another stab of forest worlds behind her eyes, she does not sound as gentle as she had wanted to when she says, “Who are you Andras?”
Because she can still see him, in the echo of her eyelids, looking out at her from between two white-as-bone birch trees.
Danaë closes her eyes as the insects and shadows gather around her in designs that flowers, and moss, and sunlight never will. In that blackness she slips into Hati’s mind, seeing the cracks in the forest as he does and wondering even as she stands still as marble in the garden how no one has noticed the worlds waiting there before. Her heart trembles at the thought and struggles to recall how to sing like a lark instead of roar like a hunting wendigo.
It is Andras that rouses her from the realm of waiting and hungry worlds. It is the look in his eyes that reminds her that the fireflies have only just returned to Delumine’s heart. And for a moment, as she blinks back the last remains of the forest cracks she can see him looking at her not through the flowers and quiet eden of the garden but through one of those cracks where wanting and rabid things wait.
Danaë thinks it would suit him.
In the distance Hati snarls at an obsidian grave rising through the dirt and his antlers scrap the moss from a spruce as he runs. “I will,” she says in a whisper, unsure if she’s saying I will to Andras or to the moonlight as it starts to fill with sound, and song, and a universe of fireflies instead of a constellation.
She tries to remember how her father seemed when the court came to call. She tries to remember how to be a flower instead of spore when she dips her head back towards him in greeting. But her horn still angles towards his heart before it runs back through the moonlight. Her mouth still does not move into a smile. When she blinks back another stab of forest worlds behind her eyes, she does not sound as gentle as she had wanted to when she says, “Who are you Andras?”
Because she can still see him, in the echo of her eyelids, looking out at her from between two white-as-bone birch trees.
RE: [coronation] with words i have no balance - Andras - 12-25-2020
AND I KNOW THAT ROME WASN'T BURNT IN A DAY
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
H
e has never known how to be soft. His softest is with Pilate, aching across the room, in physical pain because he cannot be more than a boy with a thunderhead for a heart, always rolling and booming and too far away to be truly felt-- or his softest is with her father, men made of magic and anger and something else nameless and shapeless tucked away in the dark.--But he would not know how to be her, either, or to be her sister, or mother, or beast. For all his boiling magic, for all his seething rage, Andras is too obsessed with order and quiet to be anything truly wild. If he were a dog, unleashed, he would leave a string of ruin, claws and teeth and blood, in his wake, but he would always come back to the porch, and the door, and wait in the cold for his sense to come back to him.
He wishes. Oh, god, he wishes-- but it is not possible, not really. So he is trapped, where Danaë looks at him like she knows who he is, and the someone that did--Ipomoea--is becoming the thing that is wild on both of their place. Two halves of two different wholes. Something els altogether.
I will, she whispers, not so much to him. He stands sternly before her, turning his empty glass in his grip, tilting it so the rim matches the rims of his glasses, barely bouncing light in the dark and the silence.
Andras looks at her and wonders if that's true. He looks at her and wonders if she knows she does not have to be soft and bright and beautiful to be good. He wonders if he thinks this because he has to, because there is no other option, for her, or for him.
"I'm a friend," he says, to answer her question. This is said mirthlessly, without an expected skew toward warmth. It is not said unkindly, which speaks more than anything else. "Specifically, your Emissary."
Though she is not looking, really, he does not speak further, or move more than to turn the glass again and again.
He is almost too quiet, when he asks, "How are you?"
ANDRAS, EMISSARY OF DELUMINE