[P] YOU.

[Florentine]

FLORENTINE

always one decision away from a totally different life

-- ♕ --


He rises from the dirt, a cloud of dust falling from the black of his skin like volcanic ash from a volcano. Florentine watches the dust fall, she sees the distress within his gaze. Did that ash fall like sin? Did he feel lighter now without it?
 
Still the midnight echoes with his cry, still the moonlight watches him shining silver along his black scales, scales that Flora knows to be warm and silken. She does not move from where she gazes at him above the parapets. He looks around as if ghosts close in on him from every side. Ah, her haunted Only. Still so guilty – where did his dagger hide? Was Winona still lying alone in Tinea Swamp? Florentine’s chest is also absent of her dagger, it has gone East with Lysander, to the sun with blood as their deepest desire.
 
Finally the Dusk girl turns, her slender limbs carrying her down the steps of the parapet. Down and down and down the flower-girl weaves. Down into the dark of the Night Court’s belly, here the torches meet her skin and she glows like sunlight. Her flowers are shadows against her skin, their petals sighing like wings against her throat. She steps from the dark of a doorway and out into the pool of moonlight. Florentine is grace but no longer is her silhouette an even, elegant thing. One wing lies tight and clean against her slim side and yet the other does not…
 
It hangs. It is wrong and twisted as a wing should never be. Along the broken bend of that wing, Lysander’s promise still whispers. ‘They can heal it, they can heal it.’ She came so close, so close to being able to fly again, yet a Crow with raven wings and violence in his heart has taken that chance from her. Lysander and Florentine did not leave to regain his divinity, to find gods who could heal her wing with a solitary sigh. No, they stayed and now he has left, to join a war, leaving worry twisting in her belly.
 
Flora takes the meandering path through trees and brush, her unhealed wing trailing in the dust. So long has that wingtip has been brushing the ground, so long the ground has in turn painted it it in greens and dust until its tip is no longer gilded gold but brown and black like rust and dirt.
 
Florentine’s story could be a sad one, this girl of wild flowers and a wilder spirit. She could fall to her knees at the grief of it, yet she does not. No, she moves toward Only with lavender eyes as bright as twilight. They watch him, they look him over to seek upon him any flaw, any wound that time inflicted. Yet only a horn, protruding from his forehead, whispers of any change at all.
 
You are impossible to get rid of you know, he says to her in that other voice.
 
The girl smiles, oh she laughs and the sound of it is bells in the night. The whole of Denocte sings with her, for it has almost forgotten how she sounds. She does not stop when she reaches him. Florentine does not pause until she is skin upon skin with Only. She does not rest until her chest is pressed to his and her cheek  tight against his shoulder. Only then does she stop and there her eyes close. Gold dust lashes fan along the line of her cheek. Flora drinks in the warmth of her friend, the scent of his skin, soft with a serpent’s scales.
 
“I know.” Time’s girl sighs into their embrace and her smile is wide upon her lips, thought darkness haunts the secret corners of her mouth. In the dark behind her lashes she sees the faces of her loved ones, the boys who thought her dead and the parents she thought she might never see again. “It is just as well is it not?” Her voice sings in jest and laughter breathes as spring’s new air through each word.




@Only

rallidae