He senses her nearness before he sees it, the wind of her breath stirring the soft hairs of his cheek, the dark tousles of his forelock. Everything is close and warm in this summer hall but she is close enough to be his shadow, close enough his skin prickles, each cell alive and aware.
Maybe he smiles when his eyes open and she flinches away as though startled or struck; maybe he is a little sorry.
But neither of these things are evident when she speaks, for he must strain to catch her words, even so close. Now it is his turn to lean in, to tilt toward her the curve of his ear. When hear he does his gaze flicks to hers, to catch moonlight as in his palms; but Asterion is too slow to ask her to tell him, to show him, to take him to these wonders. Ah, but he can smell them on her skin anyway, and see them in the shadows of the bone of her mask.
Leto, she names herself, as the music changes key and the bodies sway around them, as the drums beat fiercer still. Asterion takes those syllables and tucks them in his heart, where they echo like the ripples of a pebble on a lake, away and away until he knows he will remember them forever. Leto, Leto, like a ringing bell; this close he can see each line of the sigils on her skin but he is no nearer to knowing what they mean.
Her question surprises him again (though by this time in the night he should be used to the feeling). It is not the kind of thing he is used to a stranger demanding and his gaze does not shy from hers. Instead it captures it, it holds it, the way the darkness holds the moon, the way the stars hang suspended in the blackness between. “Have you been watching me, Leto, to know what is precious to me?” he asks, but there is no threat in it, only a slyness that is almost shy, only words sweet and wicked as mead. The king pays no attention to the bodies that bump into him, though he wonders that they never seem to jostle her; as the strings pick up again around them he sighs and the look in his eyes softens to sea-foam.
“I saw home,” he says simply. “I heard the birds singing in the swamp and I felt the sea-grass against my legs along the cliffside and I smelled the summer sun on the wheat as I walked into the city.” There is longing in his voice, there is sorrow and there is pride - but when he looks at her again it is something like fear that creases his eyes. His heartbeat is still quick with drink and his skin still slick with sweat from dancing but it is neither of those things he thinks of when he asks her, “Have you been there? How bad is it?”
At once he wants to regret the asking, but he can not quite bring himself to. He has been in contact with some who stayed - with Israfel - but he would hear this truth from Leto’s lips, this fearless bold girl who reminded him so what Terrastella meant.
@Leto
and hardly ever what we dream
