[P] so long we become the flowers;

[Lysander]

LYSANDER

The return of his consciousness is as slow as its departure had been swift.
 
At first it is much like dreaming. Hazy warm darkness with soft fingers of light filtering through. He is caught up then in a memory: salt on his tongue, safe under the waves, diving for oysters in the faint hopes of finding a pearl. It is weightless in the water, the current a cradle; there is little he loves so much as looking up through those slanting shades of blue.
 
But there is no staying below forever. Eventually his lungs begin to burn, to beg. Eventually he surfaces.
 
Lysander’s confusion continues once his green eyes blink hazily open. Or, rather, one eye; the other is swollen shut, the socket and his cheekbone throbbing dully. The other focuses on gray stone walls striped with shadow and he wonders when did I come home? It isn’t until he tries to reach for his injured eye that he realizes – that he remembers.
 
When his lips move to grin it’s a grimace they form instead, as his mind finally receives the pain signals his body has been ceaselessly sending. Slowly, slowly, he tests his lungs, pulling in a deep breath. He never finishes it; a different hurt stops him, sharp and silver as a knife. The pain makes him gasp.
 
No longer does he feel like that sun-golden boy diving for pearls. He feels instead like a fish flayed open.
 
He wonders if he should feel grateful to be opening his eyes at all.
 
It is that thought, as though it has unlatched some door hidden and waiting in the dim recesses of his heart, that lets in the first cold touch of fear.
 
  
 
@Florentine

[Florentine]

florentine
The moon rose and the sun set. Then night drifted into day.
 
Over and over again the stars rose, blinking through the trees with curious eyes. They watched and waited but still he did not wake. Lysander did not rise like the moon. Slowly the flower girl had come to wonder if it was the day he chose best and so she exchanged night for day and waited for him there too. But still he did not wake.
 
Florentine thought of many things as she waited. She thought of sand and bones, a world of black glass and monsters writhing in the dark and how love could birth such violence. It was violence that had changed Lysander in so many ways. He was hot where he should be cool, his remaining antler was a jagged, broken branch that had bled a river down the soft, white pine of the floor. Flora’s eyes should have run over skin pulled taught across bone, but now they lingered over flesh swollen and bruised.
 
Lysander’s consciousness creeps upon him to the song of her racing heart and the rhythmic drip of his medicine into its wooden bowl. He stirs as gently as the insect that ripples the surface of a glass lake. Slow, slow, slow, his consciousness flows across from his limbs to his face.
 
Oh what it is to see him move, to see his lips twitch! Too long they had been devoid of the smile Florentine knows so well. When had he ever been in her presence and not smiled? That was all they were: Florentine and Lysander, smiles and laughter, whimsy and stories. He liked her stories and so she told him many while he lay asleep. She told tales until her real adventures ran out and then she made them up from her dreams and lands that may only exist within her mind.
 
But he had not healed, and neither had he stirred – until now. His gasp, the raspy cry of a pain so freshly found, was a surprise. Florentine stirs from her place within the shadows. How long had she been there? How many times had the moon risen to find her still stood there? She does not know, and she does not care, for now Lysander wakes under the light of the sun, and that is enough.
 
Shaking limbs draw her from her place in the dark, where she hides her gold, her flowers, her grief. Flora steps into the light that pours through the window and her regret is art across her face. It is shadow-full lines and lips that bear no smile. When had she ever not smiled in his presence?
 
She does not want to, but she looks to the broken boy that lies below her with his ugly wound and fractured bones. Was this the cost of following her? A petal falls like testament to the tears she has long ago stopped shedding. Florentine is as dry as the sand she first met him in. This girl is rough bone exposed by coarse, windswept sand.
 
“Lysander-“ That honeyed voice starts and cannot finish, for she sees what he begins to feel. It is there, a glimmer in the dark of his eye and the shiver that crawls up her spine.
 
Fear.
 
So Florentine paints upon her lips a smile so fake and bright. She becomes everything she is not but the smile’s colours are wrong. They are water-washed with the tears of her sadness. “It took you long enough. I have been waiting.” Scolding words, betrayed by their whispered delivery.
 
She thought she might have been waiting forever.

@Lysander
 

[Lysander]

LYSANDER

Lysander would be sorry to know how many of her stories he’d missed. Perhaps they’d slipped into his subconscious anyway, pieces of her drifting in his dreams.

A dark ear twitches as he hears her stir; he might have expected that she’d be there, waiting for him to rise, but he is touched nonetheless. He will always welcome his name on her lips, regardless of the tone. When he looks to her there is little resemblance to the ebullient girl he had first met.

“Ah, Flora,” he says softly, pleased (and just a little surprised) to find his voice works at all. When he swallows he, too, thinks of the desert, of sand and bones and burning heat. It feels like he has swallowed the sun. It has gone dark inside of him, but lives searing somewhere just below his lungs - they would find it, if they carved him open.

It is still agony to move and so he doesn’t; he allows his eye to flutter back closed, lashes light as butterfly wings on the dark golden plane of his cheek. He can hear her bending nearer, the sound of her breathing; when he inhales it smells like spring with her flowers so close, though he remembers the cold bite of the snow. The way his blood looked, red and black on blue and white.

Another shallow breath, the sound of her whisper still echoing in his ears; he does not like that at all. Not coming from her, and not directed at him. Neither of them were made for sorrow or for fear, and so he tries to push it away, this feeling of running out, of ending. He is master enough of his emotions that his mind settles, though his heart is still beating too fast, too loud, a laboring clock winding down. It knows more than he does.

He can feel her eyes on him — a thing he has always enjoyed, until now. “Don’t look at me like that,” he chides her, and opens his own again, his gaze finding hers, focusing, holding. Slowly he pushes himself up, enough that his head is lifted from cool sheets. It feels strangely lopsided, and he remembers the snap of an antler, the sound like a limb (or a bone) breaking. Oh, how tatty she must find him now; he wants to laugh. His injured eye throbs, his head aches exquisitely, but that is not the source of the agony. Lysander blows out a breath, arches an eyebrow at that false smile Florentine wears, runs his mind down through the rest of his body. Neck and shoulders and legs and back, all sore but fine. Sinew and muscle, bruised but livable, easily survived. Somebody has stitched him up, in places, and done a good job of it.

So there must be something else. Something his body is keeping a secret from him, with pain the only clue.

“I am sorry,” he begins, and then pauses as he considers all the ways he might finish the statement. He could easily make a joke of it: that he had not thought this place would be far less safe than the one they had left, that he did not think her boyfriend liked him very much, that he hopes she understands a little more of what he’d meant, all that time ago and worlds away, when he spoke of love. “That we did not get to dance,” he finishes instead, truthfully, and his smile feels a little more familiar.

It was not, after all, the first dance he’d seen that had ended in blood. It was only the first time that it had been his.

His gaze drops down to the subtle knife she stills wears, scabbard raised in silver patterns of flowers. He does not yet think to ask if she remembers how to wield it.

But it stirs a memory in him, something more than hooves and teeth. A quick flash in the darkness, a sliver of moonlight come down. He thought it enough that he’d been outnumbered four to one, but to use such a lethal weapon—

“Do you think they meant to kill me?” Lysander sounds almost surprised about it; now is the first chance it’s had to occur to him. The intent may not have been for him to survive, bruised and battered but - in their eyes- having been proven a point. “It doesn’t seem like very wise diplomacy.” To laugh feels good, even when it hurts, even when it becomes a cough.

Even when it leaves flecks of scarlet on the white of the sheet.
  
 
@Florentine

[Florentine]

florentine
Ah, Flora.
 
Her eyes close – for how long had she thought she might not hear him speak again? Too fast his voice had turned to a ghost’s in her mind. It was being forgotten as fast as water passing through grasping fingers. To hear it now, in the quiet of this room, course with the sun and the pain he has swallowed, she thinks she might relish it forever.
 
Then those fae eyes snap open – to keep them closed was to deprive herself of the sight of him awake. The tendrils of death were further away when he was conscious; its portentous shadows were kept at bay.
 
Lysander chides her for the sorrow she cannot conceal, for the smile that cannot curl her lips. Her gilded chin lifts a fraction, defiant of his reprimand. “I will look at you how I please.” Those words are more soft whispers, for Florentine fears that, any louder and she might break him; might break her. There is an agony between them and she thinks, if she lets it, it might shatter them both. Her breath trembles in and trembles out, sent running by a heart that flutters with nervous wings.
 
The flower girl is touching him, with lips that follow the contours of his jaw. It’s a child’s touch, the same child that has watched herself die and wondered what it felt like. Love comes creeping in the door and draws a tear from her eye. What love is this? She doesn’t know because it makes her heart hurt more. It is a stranger here, its presence breaking her even more.
 
Flora draws away, with hair that wears blood from his wounds; it was a danger to be so close to this boy, so close to death’s expectant hands. But with that sad touch, she cannot be anywhere else.
 
I am sorry- and Florentine waits for him, like she has done for a millennia and would, for a millennia more. Fate is curling about her bones but she no longer knows what its touch means. This time-traveller girl is no longer content to just let it work its secret plans.
 
That we did not get to dance. Silence greets him from a girl so still. Only her eyes move as they wander over his body, following petals that dress him and lingering over wounds. “You fool.” Dusk breathes softly, gently. “We have danced before and we will again.” But she does not know when, and she does not know how. Already she begins to think of where she might go to find him anew; so many places, she knows.
 
“I don’t know whether they meant to kill you.” Such a rotten confession that decays her tongue with the fetid words. “But I will find out.” And there is life in that. It is a vow that sings with the song of a sword cutting through air. She had a date with the Night King and it was nothing like the ones before it.
 
He laughs, smoothing her fake smile into something softer more genuine; until the cough steals it away with its rattle and its blood. The fae-girl tastes his blood as though it were her own. She has known what it is to be so close to death as it creeps in. But she was downed in blood and mud, snow and ice. Lysander, however, is here in the softness of blankets and she is pleased she can give him that.
 
“You are dying.” She bleats, for she might never say it otherwise and it is a truth they cannot escape. “I cannot make the wound heal.” The girl looks to where it hides beneath pure white bandages and sweat-slicked skin. Can she count all the ways she has failed him? “Why did you come here, Lysander?” And she wants to be angry he has come, even when her traitorous heart still rejoices that he is here.
 
There is a breath, and then another, “Do you know how I might save you?” Those words are whispers from a girl whose lands are full of healers and not one can save him.
 
Lysander looks to her dagger and its weight reminds her of its presence. “I can go back and save you. Stop them ever finding you.” Oh this small sliver of hope to keep her from losing him. “I lost you once. I would rather not lose you again… not yet.”
 
But Florentine is always meant to lose him and find him, only this time, he had made her greedy.

@Lysander Well, this is breaking my heart.
 

[Lysander]

LYSANDER

This isn’t how he wants her to whisper, this isn’t the bedside voice he might (if he is honest) sometimes dream of hearing from her. The words are right, but the tone is oh, so wrong.

He has never been a man given to pretending, but now he wonders if he should. The thought lasts only as long as one of his too-quick heartbeats. Florentine deserves better than lies, however well-intended – and besides, she knows the truth anyway. They both do.

Her touch is warm along his jaw; can she feel the flutter of his heartbeat, the futile rush of blood in his veins? Surely she can feel the smile that grows on his lips; it keeps no secrets.

You are dying, she says, and he nods. No longer does he feel tangled in the gauzy confusion of unconsciousness; his mind is clearer, his fear is buried beneath his curiosity. There is something almost academic about the way he lifts his head, runs his green-eyed gaze down his body, bandages and bruises. It lingers on a strip of linen wound tight around his ribcage. “Yes, he agrees, and the pain sings sweetly on.

He looks up at her question, and finds her eyes on the same place his own had been. Oh, here is the thing he should have told her before, and even now his tongue wants to keep it back.

But they are beyond secrets.

“The riftlands are ending,” he says, and wonders if she will be angry with him, for withholding such news of her family, her homeland. He is careful to keep each breath light and slow, and he says no more – nothing of whether it is ending quickly, or in fire or water or sickness. He does not know, he only knows it’s true.

Do you know how I might save you? Lysander does not answer, save for the weight of his gaze on hers before it slips again to her dagger.

“It would be foolish to change so much,” he answers her, finally. His eyes lift again to hers; he shifts on the bed and winces at the bright bite of pain, hidden away beneath those bandages. He does not look to see if there is blood on them as there is on the sheets. There is no need, because he can feel it slick and hot on his skin.

Lysander does not tell her that he doesn’t want her to go back, that he can’t bring himself to be sorry for what happened, and for all the ugly truths it revealed.

Ah, but there is this: he does not want to die. Not here.

When he closes his eyes he ignores the pain, forgets each whispered breath; he searches his memory of that night. There is so little he can remember before his world went black. There had been to time at all. Except –

Again that glint of a knife. And a voice, angry, swearing, silver as a ghost. A black laugh that followed before the world crashed down. Had there been a glint in the snow, or was it only the blood in his eyes?

“I think,” he begins carefully, and opens his eyes again. Florentine is all gold, a halo of drifting sunlight around her; he feels a little remorse at what he must ask her now. Hopefully there would be time to repent. “That there is a piece of metal still inside me.” He swallows, tastes the copper of blood. There isn’t much of it, but he has a good imagination; he knows what it might feel like, to have it coat his throat.

“Can you cut more than worlds with that dagger of yours?”

He does not beg, he does not say please, but there is something in the dark undergrowth green of his eyes that asks save me.

  
 
@Florentine

[Florentine]

florentine

Florentine feels the pull of his smile as it draws along his mouth. She feels the warmth of it beneath her touch. Might she once have wondered what it would be like to kiss him? The traveller-girl isn’t sure, they have lived too many lives, crossed each other’s paths so often and each time creeps back to her: some here, some there.
 
Regret paints her every part when she draws back. It grows deep as the ocean when Lysander nods. Yes, yes her friend is dying. His affirmation was damning and tragic. It had come from her lips first, but it is worse still when it comes from him. It is just a nod; it is gesture that scolds her soul.
 
The fae-girl stirs, as if she stands in treacle, as if the intimacy of the moment pulls her down, down like quicksand. Florentine can predict so many things, she can take her knife and journey into the future, find any truth it hides. But nothing would help her prepare for the death of this boy and the revelation upon his dying lips.
 
“What?” The question is a ghost upon her lips – dead before it ever lived – so little was her voice. Her eyes search this boy. Flora thinks she might feel the warmth of his soul so deeply does she search him.
 
There is no steady pace her heart can ever again know and so it runs. It runs for her father and her mother, it would sooner flee this cage of blood and bone and reach out to them beyond the borders of Novus’ world.
 
Fabled Florentine waits for him, like she did when he slept, but her patience is thin now, her nerves made ragged by the hungry teeth of anger and sorrow. But Lysander, with one small breath, with such small, incongruous words, brings down, not just her heart, but her world. “How? Why?” the words demand of him when the fae-queen can wait no more.
 
So long she watches him from beneath the tangled ends of her gilded mane and feels the hot burn of betrayal as it singes deep into the softness of her. It makes Florentine hard – oh so many things have turned her to steel lately – is there any softness left within her?
 
“Why did you not tell me before?” A slow question it is, asked by a voice so low, so quiet; it is the gentle hum of whiskey. But there is nothing seductive here, her sorrow, her anger, has made Florentine an ugly thing.
 
But this is the irony of them:
 
Because, for all the dusk queen fumes, for all that her ire scolds her very core and makes her want to rage at Lysander too, Florentine cannot. Her eyes close and when they open they are there upon his bandage. It is whiter than it should be and cooler than his too-hot skin. How can she be angry at a boy who dies? How can she be angry at the only other one who has seen her at the end of every world?
 
Slowly her eyes flit back to him, “Metal.” She acknowledges with a breath. Oh it all makes sense, why his wound continued to fester, why it kept getting infected and nothing could stop it. There was a part of Lysander that should not be there, his body knew but she, with only ignorance to guide her, did not.
 
Slowly Florentine lifts her blade and in the golden light it gleams. Gems at its hilt glitter, and the vines of its scabbard gleam. “I do not know.” Florentine breathes a whisper breath. Fearful, oh she is so fearful. “I have never tried…” She was too proud of it; it was too precious. All the ways it cuts like air, all the ways it reaches for other worlds and pulls them to her, cutting, cutting, cutting. It knew only the seams of celestial things – not blood and skin and sinew.
 
And there it is: the girl made speechless. It is hard to speak around a heart, and hers is free, racing in her throat and stealing the breath from her lungs. It is a small question and one that, should he survive, she may laugh at later. But for now it is the question to end everything, it is a question of unimaginable horrors. “What if it cuts a world within you.” Florentine is no longer brave, she is no longer bold, but she removes her dagger anyway. She watches it, the way it hangs innocuous and beautiful.
 
“You are brave and foolish to even ask me to do such a thing.” And she thinks she might love him a little more.

@Lysander yaaay let's make Lysander a gate between worlds! O.O;
 

[Lysander]

LYSANDER

He does not hear her question – that little word, so soft – but he sees her mouth make the shape of it, as he imagines he can see the racing of her heart, the running of her blood. His own pain becomes a distant thing as he searches the shadow of her eyes, studying each glint of amber and amethyst like a man reading signs from bones and stars.

There is a part of him that wants her anger, because he knows that it is better than sorrow and fear. Anger is a thing that fights, not a thing that lets go. That is why he smiles at her questions that follow, quick as thrown stones, and while he winces it is not from the tone of her voice.

Lysander knows there is no world where he could die with Florentine angry with him. She would never let him: the golden girl – whether as queen or princess or street-running pauper – would follow a ghost to the back gates of hell for an answer to any one of her endless questions.

So he does not mind that darker look, that slow burning question, more careful than its earlier sisters.

“Keep me alive, and I will tell you everything I can.” He says it like a dare, and licks his dark lips, and finally looks away. There is sunlight slanting golden over the smooth floor, and dust motes dancing like diamond dust, and he wonders what day it is, whether it is evening or morning. He gives these questions up at the sound of her voice; they are silly things anyway, less meaningful than dust motes. Time is nothing with Florentine. This truth, too, keeps him from worrying about the rift and its thousand enemies. Time is a river Florentine could step into where she chose. Not for the first time, he wonders how much of the magic is the dagger, and how much the girl.

Here, he knows, he will need them both.

Like a leaping fish, sunlight on flashing silver, the draw of her blade catches his attention. He says nothing as she ponders, as she falls silent; he is too busy wondering the same things. Too busy wondering what he might be doing to her, asking her this – to sully a perfect thing.

Oh, but Lysander knows better than most nothing is truly sacred.  

What if it cuts a world within you? Ah, what a question it is; could she open a galaxy between his ribs, a cosmos in his marrow?

“We all have worlds within us,” he says, and shapes a shrug with bandaged shoulders. “You should know that better than anyone, anthousai.” It’s not the reassurance she is looking for – he knows he’s dancing around the question, and surely she can see that he’s wondering the same thing – but he smiles nonetheless. What a beautiful way it would be to die, rendered to nothing, his cells given way to creation and his blood to the air of some foreign universe.

It’s a fleeting thing, that smile – his gaze holds hers as the line of his mouth turns serious. As he considers all the worlds she might open, and the one that might save him. Almost, almost, he can smell the sea, and sunlight on ivy, and the whisper of wind through the trailing grapevines. Almost he can remember what it was to be a god.

“If it doesn’t seem to be working…try to take me home.” Each word is an effort, now, and each breath is bought with a new sting of pain. He knows they have spoken of his home before and he can only hope that she remembers, that it might be enough.

As she names him brave and foolish, he lays his head down on soft silk, the motion made awkward by the shape of his splintered antlers. “I’m desperate and faithful,” he says, and he is a thousand other things besides, things he would gladly tell her, if he were not running out of time. “And I want to live.”

His gaze holds hers for a moment longer, but even when he turns it to the window (bare branches sway outside like skeleton hands, waving hello, waving goodbye) it’s her face he sees. Carefully he slips away the bandages, bares the wound that will not scab, will not heal, will only bleed its rich ruby red.

“Now,” he says, and closes his eyes, and grits his teeth, and prays her knife will undo the damange of another.


  
 
@Florentine

[Florentine]

florentine

He is right.
 
There is no world in which Florentine would let him die with secrets still upon his lips.
 
This girl would follow him to the back gates of Hell, just to get an answer to her question. There is no world she is unafraid of, alive or dead. Florentine has never feared death, not until it faced her in the eyes of another; one she loved and could not allow to be taken from her so soon. Yet to be stubborn enough to follow him into the afterlife, and to possess skill enough to save him, were two separate things.
 
The fae-girl smiles when he challenges her, though her head shakes, incredulous. He licks his lips and looks away and what small smile played across her lips, fades like ghosts in the rain. “Look at me.” She says softly, demandingly. Only when his gaze returns, does she then lean closer to him. They are close, that her skin is sure it feels the touch of his. But there is no intimacy here, not beyond the privacy of her anger to be shared just with him. Florentine offers him no smile, nor spark of humour within her eyes. Even dying, Lysander will know how much he secrets cost her. “I think a part of you had better hope you don’t survive, Lysander. For to keep this information from me until now…” She trails off, for there is nothing more to be said. There is a hurt so deep and he has added to it. Her sorrow feels infinite – a well with no bottom – a universe with no end.
 
But maybe it was the dare she needed.
 
For when she steps back from him, her low voice ebbing into nothing, she takes a breath to steady her ragged nerves. Oh she wishes she could just smile at him now, but her smiles have become harder and harder to find. She will save this boy of vines and light. Who charmed the child she once was with tales of anthousai and flowers.
 
However, once more he does not help her. Again he throws away her worries and does not face them. She is both glad he does and furious at how easily he smoothes over the gravity of the moment. It is all done with a smile and a throw-away remark; clever and infuriating boy.
 
All the same, he finds her smile for her. It comes after a quip, delivered with dare and warning, “We do, but the world within you may end up being bigger and messier than most, Flower Boy.” There is a laugh that breathes upon her lips; it is little more than a sigh and a smile.
 
I am desperate and faithful. What words does she have to answer those? She searches herself and comes up empty. But that feeling, helpless and lost will not abate. Oh to have him brush over the gravity of his condition again! Those words might haunt her for forever. “You give me no choice do you?” Florentine whispers with sadness’ small voice.
 
Their fear is shared. Their fear is there in the racing of her heart, the burning of her skin. She trembles so much she may turn to dust before his eyes.
 
I am desperate and faithful. I want to live. Already they are ghosts in her mind. Already they haunt Florentine as her dagger begins to tremble too. What does it mean to save this boy?
 
She wants to know, a question burning in her mind. What gods does this boy of other worlds worship? How can he worship any? Like he, Flora has met so many and found herself kneeling before none. “Faithful to who?”  The fae-girl breathes and thinks she might find him in the afterlife just to know an answer to that alone.
 
Invisible hands unfurl the bandages and the cut is deep and ugly. It refuses to heal, like Lysander it hides its secrets deep, but this is one secret she could uncover.
 
“Then pray we see each other on the other side, Lysander.” Her lips brush his and she hopes that it will not become a ghost too.
 
Florentine knows now, that, should he die she will still go to the Riftlands and find the truth. But then, oh then she will find him. Wherever he goes, whatever life awaits him beyond this, she vows to find him and make Lysander reveal the secrets he never told her. If their lives were long alive, she would make them longer in death.
 
It is with that vow in her heart and the ghost of a kiss in her lips that she lowers the dagger to his skin. She begs it not to be subtle or magical. She begs it not to send him home or off to some other world. For once, she begs it to be plain and ordinary, untouched by any magic that might have ever graced its silver blade.
 
Florentine cries when red blood flows – so much, so fast. She weeps when worlds do not rise to her like they always do. She sighs at the song of metal upon metal and the staining of her dagger, red, red, red.
 
The trembling starts when the piece of broken dagger drops into a bowl and it does not stop until she leaves the boy unconscious. It is only outside, away from him, that the girl lets her tears join the water that washes his blood from her dagger.
 
Only then does Florentine dare to believe that Lysander will live to see another day.

@Lysander <3