in sunshine and in shadow
When they press skin-to-skin at last a breath escapes him, small and slight; it might have been a sigh. Oh, Euryale, he thinks, her name still like birdsong in his mind, lush as a nightingale. And Asterion does not pull away.
To touch her is to stand in the surf and feel the crash of the spray in time with the beat of his heart; it is to feel a riptide tug at his feet, urging him away (away to danger, away to drowning). Her skin is soft in the summer night like a petal just unfurled, but he does not miss the muscle beneath. It would be easy, he thinks, to let her lead him through the night - to guide him across treacherous paths he would never tread alone, deep and deeper yet until even the dawn could not find him again.
Oh, in that moment he wishes she would; for the first time he understands why Talia wanted so badly to burn, to drown, to die. But his golden twin never had a city sleeping beneath the restive moon, or another soul bed down beside his own, sharing a secret corner of his mind.
Asterion has never been truly free.
But Cirrus is sleeping, and so is Terrastella, and he pushes them from his mind as she pins him with her blood-bright gaze. He does not quail beneath it; he meets it, bold and wanting - ah, but he does not know what he wants, except to wish he might for a night be unmoored. Never has he met eyes so openly wanton, so hungry - he might blush if he were not well beyond it, might feel embarrassed if they were not already pressed like pages for ink to mingle. Instead he only wonders if her skin tastes like the ocean, sweat like salt and brine, or more of earth and iron. Instead he half-expects (and half hopes) to feel her teeth against him next.
Instead she speaks, and her words surprise a laugh from him, brief and coarse as a fox’s. The cicadas hum around them, agreeing with her; Asterion agrees with her, too, even as the truth she whispers pierces his heart like a sliver of silver. “You are the first to say so,” he tells her in a whisper rough as sandstone, low as a thing that curls dark and secret beneath the soil and waits to grow. Her voice in the shell of his ear raises a shiver along his neck; he wants to take her ear gently between his teeth and tug. What is it a king should look like? he wants to ask, wants to demand - let me show you how I rule - Ah, but that is not him either. It is a midnight fantasy, it is white-capped waves in a summer storm, it is a dark dream that will dissolve with morning.
What she says next only reinforces this - that he is pretending, that his business is not in thickets of reaching mangroves hidden from the path the moonlight makes on the water with a wolf who makes him wish to bare his throat.
“Yes, he is too quick to say, the word like a prayer from his lips, and does not ask what else it is she needs.
She sighs and her silks sigh against him, too, there and then away; he does not remember the night being as cool as it is when she is gone. All at once the night rushes in again, the thick smells of saltwater and swamp, the night-birds singing and the breathing of the sea. But when she speaks he meets her gaze and oh, there is a an ache inside him, a hunger for an appetite he never knew he had. It is the same hunger that compels him to watch the autumn sea for kelpies, to walk the midnight swamp for a sign of the Ilati. It is the part of him that has always believed adventure meant danger.
Almost it compels him to ask her - command her - to stay.
Instead he nods, though he never drops his gaze from her. Asterion wants to name her as she has him (he will fall into fitful sleep in the cold silver of dawn, the way she says king still in his ears with an echo of her laughter) but he does not trust himself to speak. Better silence than foolishness, better to let the ocean speak for him in sighs, in whispers.
Better to turn away at last than linger forever, until he gives in to the promise of her eyes, her skin, her teeth.
@Euryale this was such fun, thank you! I can't wait for their next thread. :)
