[P] and I know this is a weakness;

[Florentine]

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

She does not know, but she should begin to guess at the shadows that hide behind his green, green eyes. Trauma makes Florentine ignorant, turns her blind to the desires of her silent, troubled heart. It has too much to do now and it fights on, beating, beating, beating. Blood slips in her veins but it is thin, it is weak.
 
These lovers wear smiles, bright and beautiful, but his is more a lie.
 
Florentine lies because she does not know better, because her memories are shocked, kept away, kept hidden, as concussion seeps itself into her mind. With the deft hands of a pickpocket, it steals her memories away and with them the part of her heart that might still remember, were it not too tired to make its desires known.
 
But Lysander’s smile… oh that is a terrible lie and Florentine does not know better that to trust it. His touch is a balm upon her cheek. Hot breath and a touch that steals the pain from her body, if only for a moment. It makes her heart beat a little stronger; butterfly wings that turn into a hummingbird – still so small, fluttering fast. In the darkness behind her eyelids (for they are closed now, better to relish the touch he shares) she thinks she feels a flutter of familiarity, a veil that lifts in a casual breeze. But oh it falls back and keeps her from knowing. It hides all she knows once again.
 
“Lysander.” Florentine tries the name upon her tongue and would say it over and over if she did not linger too upon his other words. Her tongue still tingles with its memory when her mind begins to stray:
 
Once you named me husband. The girl takes a breath into lungs that wheeze and ribs that agonize. Ah! Shallower she sighs, chastened by pain, her smile a flickering shadow of the anguish her body paints upon the pillows.
 
“If only once then who was the fool? You or I?” The girl asks when her breath is again restored, when her pain goes back to being just a monster that prowls, no longer biting or raking its claws along her ribs. If pain were music, well, Florentine thinks that she would be the perfect instrument.
 
He thinks her flowers wilt, she does not know, for her eyes (that have trailed him curious and keen) have fallen upon the crown at his feet. The flowers there are rich where hers are indeed wilting, deprived of water, deprived of life. Such an irony it is, to see those flowers there, when her mind has, so terribly, forgotten her Flower Boy standing before her.
 
In her presence, in the shadow of his ominous words, Lysander turns black as pitch. His tines, casting dark across her face, turn her brilliant gold to shadow and ruin.
 
In his presence, even beneath that silhouette of wicked tines and violent desire, the girl glows brighter still. She frowns, at his questioning, for she does not know how the tables have turned. Florentine does not know how she stood before his sickbed and wore his blood as she pierced his skin. Neither does she know how anger seized her strong and wicked and drove her into Night to take her vengeance. If she knew, she would understand that shadow he casts over her, and how still he stands, ominous in his fury.
 
Still she smiles for she does not think she can do anything else before this boy of autumn and rain.  Even when he cuts a darkened picture above her she gazes at him and wonders what it would be to call him ‘husband’ again. Florentine would reach for him, would sink into his embrace, if only her pain would let her move.
 
“I do not know.” She breathes and sighs and aches. Her smile is stolen by a wince, a broken bone shifting, shearing. She swallows down a cry, and draws a smile redder and than red. A new droplet rests upon her gilded lips to honour the blood they both have shed.
 
Her skull tilts up, even as her body sinks into the cushions, weak and vulnerable. She does not think to be scared, not when she is alive! (For Florentine was not accustomed to slipping from death’s grasp).
 
“The nurses were whispering though. I think it might have something to do with a monster that struck me?” She returns to his question at last, but her eyes are on the floor once again, at the discarded flowers lying there.
 
“Did you bring those for me, Lysander?”

@Lysander

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world