lysander
As her heart sinks low his own is buoyed, up and up with the promise of change and adventure.
Novus has not been without such days, but it has never felt like anything but a pause to Lysander - a comma in a story unended. He has learned much since that piece of silver split his skin, since Florentine saved him - but he is not wholly mortal. In the deep-dark of him, the place where things lie in wait, he has been waiting to rise. Not discontent, not impatient, only biding its time.
Ah, that piece of himself feels sunlight when she at last answers.
“That is an easy wish to grant,” he says, and his eyes are bright new leaves, his grin for once no secret thing.
“We will go after the midsummer festival.” He says it soft, and kisses the bridge of her nose. So you may make your goodbyes, he does not add - but it is there in the sudden softness of his gaze, the way he looks at her with something like tenderness. Perhaps he does not say it because they are not goodbyes, not really.
He wonders if anything in Florentine’s time-tangled life has be a true goodbye.
“Should I worry about your brother?” he asks, but there is laughter in the twist of his mouth. Lysander has never worried about the opinions of brothers or of kings, but he knows the love that Florentine has for him. If Asterion was jealous or worried, at least he wasn’t the kind to raise those concerns with a gang and a knife in the dark.
No longer does the dagger feel strange against his chest - it is already familiar, it is a warmth, it is a promise. Almost Lysander feels like a god again already, flush with potential, memories of golden sun and ripening grapes and dances hidden far from the edges of the forest. To swim in the summer sea until the salt limns his skin, to bleed ichor like sunlight, to share wonder on wonder with the golden girl beside him.
Oh, Lysander might beg her to leave now, if it weren’t for his own goodbyes to make.
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