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;
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
