IPOMOEA
there's no place i'd rather be
T
he air stirs when she arrives, sending a fresh scattering of petals over him and through the forest. He can’t help but breathe in deeply, his lungs crying out for something other than ash and smoke and charred flesh - and he is not disappointed. Florentine brings a breath of fresh air with her; however short-lived it may be, he plans on taking full advantage of it. His lungs sigh with relief, his heart steadies its frantic beating; and he is comforted by the familiarity of his friend, standing with him in this forest that had become a stranger. His inhale is sharp and painful when she comes beside him, but it doesn’t burn quite so much as the tears that threaten to pour from behind his eyes. He blinks them away quickly, angrily, hoping she wouldn’t see how his eyes turned so red at the edges.
His response is a nod, a shaky tilt of his head. Does such a tragedy need anymore explanation? The evidence was in abundant display. “I heard about Terrastella’s floods, how the ground gave way underhoof.” Maybe he should consider himself and his Court lucky; or at least no worse off than the others. They had all suffered this past year, each in a different way.
He couldn’t help how much more personal this felt; he had tried to keep up with the other Courts, he had wanted to check in on them. It was the emissary in him, or maybe the philanthropist, that made him need to know what was going on elsewhere in the world, to offer his help and support.
But his own grief hadn’t allowed him to. Ipomoea told himself that he had stayed home because he was Regent now, because Delumine needed him more than the other Courts did. But really it was a far more selfish decision on his part. He had stayed home to mourn, to wallow in his own self-absorbed sadness while he ached for the beauty that Delumine used to be. True, not all of the forest was gone: the northern reaches were largely untouched, and the fires had not burned quite so far to the west, either.
Only most of it was gone.
”You make beauty where it’s needed most.”
Ipomoea finally lifted his eyes, meeting the flower queen’s violet gaze. He can only swallow thickly, wings fluttering like broken things at her touch. “I only wish I could make more,” he heard himself say, with a voice so tinged with sorrow he did not recognize it as his own. “A mini meadow can hardly replace a forest.”
He casts his gaze down, away from Florentine, and can’t help but focus on the petals she has brought with her, how they stand out so vibrantly against the grey of the ground.
A breeze causes them to scatter, sending them tumbling, rolling through the ash, and they too are turned black.
“Tell me something good,” he finally begs, breaking the silence again. There’s an unspoken desperation in his eyes, a plea for her to bring some joy into this place to accompany the flowers he’d made.
If she has any left to give, that is.
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