[P] and I know this is a weakness;

[Lysander]

 
 
 


He had not expected her smile.

Not now, not after all that had been born of the gods here, and their conversations on gods in the past. Instead he had braced for her anger, fresh as a new storm – well he remembers it, the way it struck like tinder from her words and darkened her eyes to aubergine.

But this song of her words, the curve of her lips – he wonders how much is the medication, the effect of root and herb.

To her next remark he says nothing; what is there to say? If he were still a god, this would not have happened to her. If he were still a god, whatever had caused this would be bleeding and sorry, paying twice over for each mark upon her golden skin.

If he were still a god he would not be here at all – and oh, would that be better?

But the demands of his Anthousai are never satisfied; tell me, she says and his gaze is lingering on her dagger when her own eyes open. The healers – or somebody – had done as best they could to clean it, but there is still blood between the links of chain, rust-dark against dim silver. This alone is enough for him to forget the dying aches of his own wounds, fresh scabs that will leave more pale scars.

Yet he smiles at her guesses, turning back to her with a slow shake of his head.

“You could say I was careless – too careless, and too curious. I grew bored of the path I was set upon, and cast aside my divinity that I might explore other paths. But it was the Rift that stripped me of the last of my godhood, and turned my small remnant of ichor to blood.” He had not thought it a bitter thing then – he had thought it very fine, to be mortal. It made everything new, everything holy the way all fleeting things were holy. What was beauty, if it did not eventually crumble to dust?

Oh, but some things fled too soon. That is where the fear came in – the hunger for more, ever more, one more drink before the cup (such a rich vintage, like nothing else) is taken for good.

She looks at him and sees beauty, and he looks at her and feels his heart beat too quickly, wondering how close she had come to being gone, spilled out like an empty glass.

It pains him, then, to talk of being a god – for it reminds him only of how helpless he now is, how far from power.

Are you a wicked god?

Lysander’s smile turns sly, a fox in the shadow of a tangle of briars.

“And what does it mean, to be wicked? I acted as instructed by my nature. I always thought it more the territory of men.” He pauses, licks his lips, remembers the taste of blood – his own, and a monster’s, and the thought of more. “Maybe I am more wicked now than I ever was before.”  

A flurry of motion; like the sun she rises, heedless of the clouds. The first thing that rises to his lips then is a rebuke – it is too much, it is too soon, and Isra the unicorn would command her to lie down. But Lysander steps back to give her room as she struggles to her feet like a foal, and only the rain beats a warning against the bark of their shelter.

Softly he reaches for her, silently passes his lips over her scar, breathes gently (so careful not to touch) over the sharp and broken angle of her wing, at last bringing the soft skin of his nose to rest against her cheek.

“It leaves us free,” he breathes, and it sounds too hopeful, too young, to come from lips as old and dark as his. “We can be anything we want, or only what we are.” A pause; he smiles against her skin, even as he makes his voice stern as cedar-roots, and hard as antlers. “But first you must rest, or you will never be anything at all except a girl who cannot walk, and cannot fly, forever hounded by a boy who is not a god.”  

I can play the fool you need
make me make it up to you

@Florentine

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

Ah she is torn, in body and mind (yet not in soul). Her rent flesh cries like needles, hot like fire and wet with worry. She knows their pain, their constant throb. It is, after all, easier to ignore her wounds when their ache is constant and her heart is filled with wonder. So it is her mind she focuses on, and how it is two halves: the part that drives her heart faster for want of a boy who cast aside divinity as though it were dust upon his skin and the other that twists her stomach tight for selfish worry that he might so easily be plucked from her grasp (oh, such fragile mortality!).
 
Florentine studies the fallen god for but a moment before her lips are upon the groove of his throat. There they feel the pulse, the beat of a heart fragile and striving. She wonders what a divine heart might feel like and how spilled ichor would glisten. Would it be black, silver or red, like her own?
 
Against the groove of his throat (strong, elegant, familiar) Flora wonders, “Would you take your divinity back if you were offered it?” Was there anything a time traveller could not do? She knows of so many things, but they all seems small and insignificant when she considers how she can take a boy back and make him a god again. Time was her lover and her god, in it she could do anything.
 
She is stood, swaying like leaves in autumn’s breeze. Her gold is pale as a new dawn, her eyes as wide as the foal he likens her ascent to. Lysander touches when he should have chided her. Florentine stands when she might have shied away. It is easy to trust him and impossible to imagine a world in which he might hurt her. Foolish; she smiles whilst her stitched heart forgets its scars.
 
He is more wicked now, or so he says. Florentine believes his every word as they pour like spring from his lips. Yet still she does not draw away, “It would be boring if you weren’t wicked, Lysander.” The girl says with a smile that turns impish, with a laugh that is wicked and beautiful.
 
His nose rests upon her cheek though her scar still remembers him and her wing the touch of his breath. What use is there in keeping her eyes open? They close, heavy and content, but her lips still smile – until he steals that too. What will he leave her with?
 
Nothing. Florentine knows this and does not fear it, even though she knows just how Lysander will chide her and warn her with a faraway smile and eyes that both pull her in and push her away.
 
Free.
 
The Dusk girl smiles with him, her smile a mirror to his own. It is in pain (one she cannot name) that she pulls her cheek from the curve of his smile. “Do you promise?” She breathes as she drinks in his curls, his arching antlers, his every mortal inch. It would be easy to think she asks of him a profound promise, so it is a blessing, may be, when she clarifies playfully, “Do you promise to forever hound me? Because, until now, I thought I was hounding you.”
 
And, quite suddenly, their past, their present and their future seemed, all at once, so very different.

@Lysander - hahahahaha, oh man, this is bad. Please excuse me whilst i remember how to write words.

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world

[Lysander]

 
 
 


Oh, he wants to quail at the feeling of her lips on his throat, hot breath and the scent of flowers and blood. But Lysander does not tremble, only tilts his chin away to open another soft centimeter to her tender mouth.

If she were not so caught up by the beat of his heart (quickening like a hawk’s with her so close) she might notice the way his dark clean limbs are taut and still. His lashes brush his cheeks when he closes them, and the sigh that slips between his teeth then sounds almost pained, though his own injuries are long forgotten.

But then he laughs, a low rumble like roots pleased to find rich earth as they reach down into the darkness. “It depends on the circumstances,” he says, and he is almost sorry for the way he can never give her a straight answer for anything.

The sound of thunder echoes his laughter, and perhaps Novus is laughing at the two of them, for it knows what is to come as such fragile mortals talk of gods.

Foolish, indeed.

And ah, his heart thrills to hear her voice slide over the syllables of his name, to hear it next to wicked. Her laugh makes him remember what it was to have ichor and not blood – rich and hot as molten gold.

There is a part of him (one he pushes away, buries deep within the tangled thorns and shadows of trees) that wonders how it is they are closer than they have been, nearer to some edge neither will name, when he is as good as a stranger to her. What does it say about the both of them?

“To bore you is the greatest sin I can think of,” he says – though the warning she anticipates presses up against his teeth. You should not talk so boldly to strangers – don’t you listen to fairy tales? Lysander cannot bring himself to speak it; he is selfish, greedy for her touch, for her laugh.

And nonetheless she pulls away, and Lysander feels the tension and the heat slip from him like shedding his shadow – until her next words catch him and hold him fast.

Do you promise?

Oh, Anthousai – he has never promised anything in his long and strange existence. To promise was to make a thing permanent and to be permanent was to wither. Lysander is no stranger to offerings but this, oh, this –

Even the playful tone of her voice does not bleed the stillness from his limbs, the dark gleam of his eyes. She has given him a gift, the room to make light of this moment, and perhaps she would forget this conversation the way she’s forgotten all but the shape of him like an indent in silk sheets.

“I promise,” he says, and his gaze holds hers like twisting vines. But his smile is swift on the heels of his words, too little room for the weight of them to echo. “Only if you lie down and rest. I must go, Florentine, but I will not be far.” How strange it is, to feel his heartbeat so unsteady – and before his body can betray the strange nerves that have swallowed him, he presses a kiss to the tender skin above her eye and slips from the room like night receding.

when I first saw you
the end was soon

@Florentine <3 clearly they were fine enough to make him all flustered