Their breaths are visible in the cold night air, twisting like ghostly snakes into the sky, spiraling around each other into they’re indistinguishable. And then they slowly, slowly dissipate, as if chased away by the brilliant colors overhead.
Ipomoea drifts ever closer, until the warmth of her skin is palpable in the space that separates them. All the while his eyes are turned to the sky, even as his ears tilt to catch her words. He wants to ask if the lights were the same, in her other life, in that other place, but something in her voice stops him. The wind steals his voice.
”Did you come to see them?”
He freezes subconsciously at her words, looking at her, briefly, from the corner of one eye. She could just as easily be asking about tonight and about the stars, as she could be talking about Denocte itself. Does she know that the Night Court was not his home, that he was a run-away, an orphan, a renegade? That he was the Regent of another Court, a Court he loved yet abandoned? Does she care?
He looks away.
Of course she doesn’t, his mind chastises him. She’s at least as much a stranger here as you. He supposes she wouldn’t have asked, had she known. There was a shyness in her voice, but a friendliness that drew the smallest of smiles to his lips.
“Yes,” he hears himself telling her, his mouth speaking of its own accord now. And he makes no effort to stop it. “We’re in a Court that never sleeps; even the sky dances the night away. I supposes I wanted to see them for myself.” He smiles absently, watching the colors expand across the sky, further and further like fire on the horizon. Like fire in the markets…
“I’m Po.”
His voice is warm, far warmer than the cold winter air. Again his breath appears before him, frosty and spectral. He lets the silence stretch between them, the air static, the sky alive, and the wind a constant whistle in the background.
“You’re not from here.”
It is not a question; he was not from Denocte, either, so she would find no judgement in him. And yet when he turned to look at her, there was a curiosity in his gaze, a hungry look to his eye.
“Did you come here to see them?” He echoes her own question, a smile playing at his lips.
having no one,
forced by my nature to
keep wandering
because wandering
was the only thing
that i believed in
and the only thing that believed in me
@cassilyn !
”here am i!“
