FLORENTINE
always one decision away from a totally different life
She knows now that there is no emotion he cannot make her feel. She stands both tall and small beneath his scrutiny and thinks that she has learned to much about him. And yet he tells her nothing at all.
Her eyes blink slow, slow as she watches him. They blink slower still as she regrets all that she has confessed to him and hopes that he might hide her every transgression.
There is no part of him she does not watch and she might wonder when she ever came to watch him so, except that this has always been their way. In the dark chasm of a leviathan’s skull she watched this boy (through a child’s eyes who knew so little but believed everything was hers to know). Beneath a sky of satin and stars, upon a sea of glass she danced and watched him until the faded into into nothingness.
Now she looks and sees him again. Oh she recognizes his every inch in her shame and in her joy. He is so steady beneath her gaze, her rock to which she clings. But Lysander is too steady; he holds himself too fast. His secrets are his own but oh she wants him shaken free and as loose as she. She wants his secrets as her own, for she is greedy and she is keen.
Florentine is in too deep and she does not even recognize the smile that curls her lips when he offers her no absolution but rather gives her everything else.
Are you a god? He had asked her earlier and that is all Florentine still hears. Even as she laughs, even as she leans away as though she is not worthy. May gods rise between them and smite her for her refusal to love them and worship at their dusty altars! “I am no god, Lysander.” She says as his lips press upon her cheek, as her skin thrums for his proximity. “If I were a god I would not have cried over your broken body but healed you as one could.” Her laughter is gone, her smile fled too. “I do not worship gods, but if there had been one able to save you, I might have been tempted.”
She sways as he leaves her and feels the thrum of something other. He pulls back, but does he know he only pulls her in? She moves like a magnet beneath the allure of him. Yet her gaze is not for him, it is for the festival that thrums around them.
What would she do in the meantime, if she will not go back now and save the ones she loves? This girl stands, selfish and gold and full of a magic she will not use. Her eyes sway to Lysander. They are waters running in to pull him down into the deep of her. Oh she had heard of kelpies pulling their prey into the depths. As she looks back to Lysander she wonders just who hunts who.
Florentine leans into her flower boy, lets her body rest against his as she never has (but has a thousand times before and a thousand more to come). She lifts her face to hide in the curve of his jaw and there her selfishness does not end. For there she seizes fate fiercely and whispers, “Make you stay with me.”
@Lysander | | notes: so um... yeah. o.o
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
