lysander
“I’m sure they’re already singing lays of you in worlds you have left,” he says, “and if not yet, then it is only because you haven’t gotten there yet.” To anyone else his words might be madness; but Florentine knows the way time is not linear at all but a circle, a wheel, a great flat expanse of glass with stars and monsters above.
At her own comment (at his own songs), Lysander presses his lips together as though he is keeping his smile within. I will show you one day, his gaze tells her, when it presses on hers with its dark and verdant green.
But she draws a laugh out of him yet, and he shakes his head, his curls dark and errant as a boy’s. “Careful, Anthousai. I have plenty I could say about the girl who nearly forgot herself.” His smile then is quick but not cruel; her injury is still a fresh bruise, lying too near his own heart. Ah, but who else could have coaxed a monster from the in-between and stood laughing so soon after?
Lysander does not think the dagger he wears now, still warm from her skin as though it were a sun it lay against and not a girl, would give him such a gift.
Together they shatter the mirror of the lake, and wash away the curtain of new starlight. Together they are a tangle of limbs, of young-eternal bodies slick and cool, of flashing eyes and laughing mouths. It is easier to forget her injured wing, cradled by the water; it is easier to think of nothing at all but her teeth against his neck, her shoulder against his ribs, her warmth the only warmth.
And then her words -
“Oh?” he answers archly, and the gleam in his laughing eyes then is wicked. “Pray tell, Florentine, what sort of interesting things you know of.” He might have ghosted his muzzle along the arch of her neck, then, might have pulled dark lips from his wanting mouth - oh, but Florentine is always one step ahead of him, her words and nimble mind a river ever-running.
“Ah,” he says then, falling still where he stands with his hooves pressed into soft mud and algae, water lapping at his hips and his shoulders, the dying wake they’d made. Lysander is the closest to taken aback he has, perhaps, ever been; for a moment even his eyes widen, reflecting the moon that hangs above, a watching silver sliver.
Even so he might have said yes but for the sound of bubbles, and he drops his gaze to her, watching him like a very lovely, very silly hippopotamus. Instead he laughs again, low and full, and shakes his head. His wet mane sprays water on them both, glimmering like jewels or stars, like diamonds in a veil.
“Perhaps you should first heal your ribs,” he says, mock-serious, even as he bends his antlered head down toward hers to nip at an exposed ear. “And possibly your leg, and maybe, also, your wing-” Ah, but he ruins the guise by laughing again, and falls silent with the soft skin of his nose pressed against her neck.
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