FLORENTINE
always one decision away from a totally different life
Being with Lysander is both easy and hard. Away from him, a part of her aches, beside him, another part does too. For he is a challenge, he reveals the parts of her she works so hard to hide – from herself, from others. He knows her completely and she stirs, uneasy with such revelation, and yet, content too.
His laughter stirs her mane and breathes across the gold of his skin. Despite her ache she turns into his embrace – a sunflower toward its sun.
This talk of theirs, of eternities and losses, weighs her heart so low. Her chest throbs with the effort of keeping her heart aloft. But Florentine does not shy from it, not when she is made from endless nights and unnumbered days, not when her existence is a strange and unworldly thing.
Lysander speaks of being remade and she knows that, oh how she knows death and rebirth. But does she know of how he is remade, over and over? She wets her lips, for they are dry – dry with worry for their talk of his eternal death. Her skin, still damp with the lake’s midnight water, is cold as ice, but she does not feel it. Not when he warms one side of her with his, not when she looks to the green of him and thinks of all the verdant worlds they might miss.
“Mmm.” Flora hums like bells, the tips of her wings brushing the grasses at their feet. The meadow smells are rich and warm and sweet upon her tongue. As she relishes the meadow sweet, she considers his words and wonders all the ways you can be unmade in order to be remade. Her skull tilts, her chin lifts and she gazes at the angle of his jaw from beneath the heavy veil of her fringe. “I do not know, Lysander…” How can you ever ask a boy who has never died if being unmade is something akin to death? Florentine supposed, in many ways, it likely was. And not once more that night does she wonder why it is that he knows her so well.
Her lips smile with his laughter, her eyes gleam as her nose nudges his chin. “Never.” Florentine breathes more truth into that one word than she has the whole of her life. Her smile is gone now and Lysander’s laughter is carried away upon the breeze. She hears its echo in the mountains and sighs but says nothing for already she has noticed the change in him, the change in herself. His heart at once is faster, it thrills in his veins and her own heartbeat rises in answer.
Home.
She lays aside her own questions of where her home is (for without crowns and with so many of her family strewn through the worlds she cannot name all the places she wishes to call home). But for Lysander there is just one place and it is not here. Her breath is trapped within her lungs that strain.
“Only if I can sleep beneath the stars with the anthousai.”
@Lysander
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
