asterion,
Love is not for earning, he wants to say again, when she answers him so matter-of-factly. Oh, the things he would tell her, the things he hopes she knows - that love is not a gift given for deeds done, or payment to be bartered. That it is inevitable, uncontrollable; that sometimes he is certain it will be his undoing, that it almost has been already.
Maybe it is lucky that she speaks before he can.
For all the fire in her eyes tonight, for the low smoke of her laugh and the way she touches him, he had not expected those words. They could fell him like a dove for the way that she speaks them, fearless as a lion. The king of saltwater and starlight does not shy from her response, but oh - he cannot say whether his heart is flying or falling. Perhaps there is no difference.
There is nothing in the hall but her, and the gold of her eyes against the black of them, and the words that rush against his ears like the tide against the beach, washing over and over him. I want you, I choose you, I love you. It is not what he was braced for, not after the memory of their last parting; when she leans close he wonders, just as Moira does, if she can feel the beating of his heart. When she murmurs words so close he can feel the warmth of their speaking Asterion closes his eyes and lets them fall into his heart like stones rippling down a well, or like wishes cast down to the sea.
And then Moira steps back.
If he walks away, he thinks, then she will only come after him again. If he says nothing at all, then they might only continue to orbit one another’s stars, to tug at the other’s loyalty and reason and weigh each other’s hearts.
But there is already so much that anchors them both. Asterion is no longer a cloud or a comet, free to roam and to name his own path - and neither is Moira. For a long moment he only stands with his eyes downcast, memorizing the feeling of her cheek pressed against his own, the warmth of her, the way each feather and inch of skin is richer than firelight. He thinks of what has befallen all the love he has witnessed - Florentine and Reichenbach and Isorath and Aislinn, and all the terrible ways a ruler’s passion could turn to ash, laying waste to all it touched. Beneath him their shadows mingle and jump, thick as the wine in his blood. Between them hangs the word she had spoken and every beat of his heart echoes the shape of it.
Asterion pulls in a breath and lifts his gaze to meet hers.
“You called me empty, and I am. Terrastella asks everything of me, every beat of my heart and thought in my head. I thought - once I thought I could balance that with what I wanted. That love was a thing that could grow and make room. But now I think there is not enough of me to give.” Steady, he urges his heart, but it is well beyond listening; it tolls like a bell, it hammers against his ribs, it protests that he is wrong. Asterion thinks that if he paused long enough the whole room could hear it racing.
“When I first met you on the cliffs, and you told me your home was Denocte - I wanted to ask you then to stay.” Still he holds her gaze, still his voice is low and steady, and all the firelight in the room burns and burns upon his dusky skin. “I will not ask you now. Your people need you, Moira Tonnerre, and mine need me.” In this moment (perhaps this moment alone), he is every inch a king; fierce and proud and steady from the flicker of firelight in the dark of his eyes to the set of his shoulders and slope of his neck.
Yet before her he still feels like a boy. Asterion feels no more grown than the man he had been years ago, standing in a sickroom in Denocte, shivering from the rain and Aislinn’s delirious pain. I love you, he had told that lightning-storm of a girl, and she - broken and frightened and drugged - had returned his words. Now he finds they are difficult to drag back to his tongue, and for the first time since he began speaking he looks away. “Love makes a fool of me. And this is a bad time for fools.”
There is no telling what he is thinking of then; if it is another girl with a wrecking in her soul and a constellation on her skin, or if it is a people suffering at the whim of their own god, or if it is wondering what which disaster will befall them next. But when he meets her eyes again (if she will still meet his) something in Asterion is already gone, faded like seafoam on a dark and silent beach.
“Goodnight, Moira.” For a moment, he leans toward her, as though he is considering breathing a kiss onto her cheek. But Asterion does not touch her, not when he said he would not, not when he has given her nothing in response to the brave baring of her own heart. For one moment, he might yet close the distance between them - and then he turns away, walking like a condemned man through the crowd, his gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the hall. The king does not glance aside for anyone, and does not feel the burn of eyes upon his back.
When he leaves, all that remains of him is the piece of paper on the table - blank but for a scrawl of neat black letters.
I’m sorry.
king of dusk.
@
