A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
He has worried for all of them - oh, Asterion never guessed before how much dread his heart could hold, a dark river ever-threatening to spill the banks of his soul - but of course it is Florentine that he thinks of most of all.
Is it better, that her memories are a hazy field, a splintered mirror? Wouldn’t it be worse to bring her here when she remembers everything fresh as a new bruise?
He does not want to cause any more hurt. (Not when the memory of Talia still seeps golden into his dreaming hours, like light bleeding under a door. All he’d ever wanted to do was help her, love her, carry her).
But Asterion knows Florentine now as well as himself, and though she is different than Marisol in a hundred ways - a thousand, he thinks wryly - he knows that neither of them are the kind to break. How many times has his sister remade herself, reknitted her life? This would likely not even be the last.
None of this knowledge keeps his heart from stumbling when he sees her in a rare moment where they are both alone. The sun shines on the broken cobblestones and the winter-brown grass and all their shaggy backs, but it does not shine as it ought to on Florentine. This is enough to bring him forward when his steps might have carried him way, afraid of her disappointment as both queen and sister.
He closes with her easily, matching her pace, noting how similar their lean ribs look, like rolling dunes in miniature. What a pare they made, both faded; and yet he smiles at his sister, and touches his nose to a strand of curls that still lays like a beam of sunlight across her shoulder.
“You’re the only thing still blooming,” he says softly, when he’d meant to only ask her how she was.
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