He chases her across the moonlit grasses like any god after a fleet-footed Anthousi with golden hair, trailing flowers and tears. But it is not the ichor-bloody heart of a god that drives Lysander to catch up with her - it is something else, something stronger and stranger. Yet for its newness he does not think of his new-feathered hope as a fragile thing, and no less holy than the rest of him.
At last she turns toward him, and waits like a bride beneath the silver light. Each unshed tear limns her eyes in diamond shine, sharp enough to cut, but the antlered stallion does not fear her edges. He is not dissuaded by her midwinter laugh; he only closes the distance between them, to feel the warmth of her, to share his warmth in turn.
In how many worlds, he wonders, has he gone to her beneath the stars? In how many will he? (None, he supposes, as long as it is he who bears her dagger).
He says nothing as she regards him, as she bends near to press her lips to the dagger. Her breath pricks at the skin of his chest and he inhales again the scent of her.
When her question comes he flicks an ear and his gaze on her is nothing but steady and ancient, deep as soil and green as new growth. “No,” he answers. “Child-like, in some ways, but that is a different thing.” Lysander does not elaborate; he can see all the words building up in the amethyst of her eyes and he is beginning to understand that not all wounds are physical, and not all healing is done with herbs and magic.
There is, too, his own folly to consider - desecrating a patron god’s temple was hardly the height of maturity. But Lysander would not be sorry for the things he had done, when fear for her had curdled to rage in his veins.
So when she continues he only listens, though his mouth presses firm and dark and thin at the mention of Raymond. What battles belong to him, what revenge is his to seek? He thinks of Calliope, of her talk of retribution, but Lysander only shifts his weight against the memory. It does not yet occur to him that these are secrets he perhaps should not keep from Florentine; he has spent so very long being responsible only to himself.
Oh, love is a vine that grows and winds, and not all things could be cut even with a silver dagger.
Her voice is cold silver with sorrow, and wounds him more deeply than a knife. When she steps nearer he wishes for arms to welcome her with; he wishes for wings to shelter her close. But Lysander has neither of these things, and so can only offer her the warmth of his body, the press of his shoulder, the brush of his lips against her neck, her cheek. “I would change nothing.” He says it like a vow into her ear. “When you are always starting over it is too easy not to learn anything. For a thousand years I never changed, and thought myself content.” Lysander’s voice is dry as autumn branches, his soft laugh like rattling leaves.
But his voice turns softer, then, and he tilts his head so that his gaze might catch hers, might hold it. “We have all the time we need, Florentine. But I would not waste any on regret.”
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
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.
She cannot hide her hurts from him, not when she has always worn her expressions like the sky wears clouds. Her face, her voice, it is all a map that is easy to read; it is one of the things that has always drawn him to her. So when she turns her gaze away he only presses the dark velvet of his nose against the curve of her neck.
Does she know his intent is not to condemn her sins? Lysander has never been interested in playing the judge (it would be a difficult task, anyway, with such a loose view of right and wrong.) He is interested only in truth - though truth, to him, is fluid as sunlight on water, a thing with tension, a thing that might scatter and change.
At her question he breaths a laugh, brief and low. “I said I thought myself content. Believing yourself something and being it are as different as childish and child-like.” The antlered stallion (no longer a god, empty of ichor and empty of eternity) considers how he had told her, once, that he became mortal for curiosity’s sake. His answer has not changed, though he does not repeat it again.
It is cool, with their damp skins drying in the summer night air; her lips against his throat are warm as the touch of an ember. They trace fire across his skin and he leans into her in turn. Further up the hill, deeper in the woods, a pair of whip-poor-whills sing a liquid duet, and crickets sing a chorus around them. As Flora breathes in, Lysander lets his eyes slip closed, and inhales only the scent of her. Her whisper stirs the fine hairs of his throat; an ear twitches, lazy.
Tonight her worry does not reach him, her fears fail to catch like sparks. “Why should it be bad? Has someone set you rules, to govern your gift?” There is a smile in his voice, even as his eyes remain closed, even as his mouth is a languid, lazy line. “As a god I have been reborn a hundred times. Is that the same as dying?”
There is only a fluttering of that fear, a dim memory of what he had felt to see her laid low, or to feel a silver dagger fast between his own ribs, when she mentions losing him. Only then do his eyes open again, and he regards her. Even so his eyes are evergreen, his heart as steady as slow-growing roots of oak.
Maybe, she says, and Lysander says nothing (for he has no answer, not to that - he has not known what he was made for since he became something other than a god). This close he can see the starlight reflected in the liquid dark of her eyes, and he begins to count each distant point the way he might count the petals in her care.
But at her question he pauses his idle counting, and blinks, and laughs again, as rich and dark as the spill of his mane over his burnished golden neck. “To die? Are you already so tired of adventuring with me?” Slowly his smile fades, and he glances briefly out to the night around them. Fireflies flash in the dim, a distant, brief echo of the stars; when he turns his gaze back to her the smile he’d worn is gone. “I do not wish to die. In fact, I would show you how I lived. I think we both still have things to learn, and healing that must be done.” He falls to silence, and only then does his heart flutter with something like nerves, something like fear, something like excitement.
“I would show you my home, if you’re ready, and if you will take us.”
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
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.”
As her heart sinks low his own is buoyed, up and up with the promise of change and adventure.
Novus has not been without such days, but it has never felt like anything but a pause to Lysander - a comma in a story unended. He has learned much since that piece of silver split his skin, since Florentine saved him - but he is not wholly mortal. In the deep-dark of him, the place where things lie in wait, he has been waiting to rise. Not discontent, not impatient, only biding its time.
Ah, that piece of himself feels sunlight when she at last answers.
“That is an easy wish to grant,” he says, and his eyes are bright new leaves, his grin for once no secret thing.
“We will go after the midsummer festival.” He says it soft, and kisses the bridge of her nose. So you may make your goodbyes, he does not add - but it is there in the sudden softness of his gaze, the way he looks at her with something like tenderness. Perhaps he does not say it because they are not goodbyes, not really.
He wonders if anything in Florentine’s time-tangled life has be a true goodbye.
“Should I worry about your brother?” he asks, but there is laughter in the twist of his mouth. Lysander has never worried about the opinions of brothers or of kings, but he knows the love that Florentine has for him. If Asterion was jealous or worried, at least he wasn’t the kind to raise those concerns with a gang and a knife in the dark.
No longer does the dagger feel strange against his chest - it is already familiar, it is a warmth, it is a promise. Almost Lysander feels like a god again already, flush with potential, memories of golden sun and ripening grapes and dances hidden far from the edges of the forest. To swim in the summer sea until the salt limns his skin, to bleed ichor like sunlight, to share wonder on wonder with the golden girl beside him.
Oh, Lysander might beg her to leave now, if it weren’t for his own goodbyes to make.
