lysander
She cannot hide her hurts from him, not when she has always worn her expressions like the sky wears clouds. Her face, her voice, it is all a map that is easy to read; it is one of the things that has always drawn him to her. So when she turns her gaze away he only presses the dark velvet of his nose against the curve of her neck.
Does she know his intent is not to condemn her sins? Lysander has never been interested in playing the judge (it would be a difficult task, anyway, with such a loose view of right and wrong.) He is interested only in truth - though truth, to him, is fluid as sunlight on water, a thing with tension, a thing that might scatter and change.
At her question he breaths a laugh, brief and low. “I said I thought myself content. Believing yourself something and being it are as different as childish and child-like.” The antlered stallion (no longer a god, empty of ichor and empty of eternity) considers how he had told her, once, that he became mortal for curiosity’s sake. His answer has not changed, though he does not repeat it again.
It is cool, with their damp skins drying in the summer night air; her lips against his throat are warm as the touch of an ember. They trace fire across his skin and he leans into her in turn. Further up the hill, deeper in the woods, a pair of whip-poor-whills sing a liquid duet, and crickets sing a chorus around them. As Flora breathes in, Lysander lets his eyes slip closed, and inhales only the scent of her. Her whisper stirs the fine hairs of his throat; an ear twitches, lazy.
Tonight her worry does not reach him, her fears fail to catch like sparks. “Why should it be bad? Has someone set you rules, to govern your gift?” There is a smile in his voice, even as his eyes remain closed, even as his mouth is a languid, lazy line. “As a god I have been reborn a hundred times. Is that the same as dying?”
There is only a fluttering of that fear, a dim memory of what he had felt to see her laid low, or to feel a silver dagger fast between his own ribs, when she mentions losing him. Only then do his eyes open again, and he regards her. Even so his eyes are evergreen, his heart as steady as slow-growing roots of oak.
Maybe, she says, and Lysander says nothing (for he has no answer, not to that - he has not known what he was made for since he became something other than a god). This close he can see the starlight reflected in the liquid dark of her eyes, and he begins to count each distant point the way he might count the petals in her care.
But at her question he pauses his idle counting, and blinks, and laughs again, as rich and dark as the spill of his mane over his burnished golden neck. “To die? Are you already so tired of adventuring with me?” Slowly his smile fades, and he glances briefly out to the night around them. Fireflies flash in the dim, a distant, brief echo of the stars; when he turns his gaze back to her the smile he’d worn is gone. “I do not wish to die. In fact, I would show you how I lived. I think we both still have things to learn, and healing that must be done.” He falls to silence, and only then does his heart flutter with something like nerves, something like fear, something like excitement.
“I would show you my home, if you’re ready, and if you will take us.”
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