in sunshine and in shadow
Oh, he might have laughed to hear her thoughts - to think of the scorn of being refused before a crowd. Has she forgotten already that that is what she’d done to him? Denied the want he’d thought they shared? At least his words had been soft, and no china had suffered.
Of course he does not; there is only the turning of her cheek. Asterion, ever obedient, steps back enough to open yet more daylight between them, yet more space for other things to grow.
(He thinks of all those portraits she painted, images of himself staring back more clear than any lake or mirror could provide. what does she see when she looks at him now? does she regret each brushstroke, does she wish to see them burn like a letter signed with his name?)
The king’s gaze watches the tiger trail away into the brush, the roll of her shoulders, the last flick of her tail before she is swallowed up by ferns and brush. The sound of his name on her tongue, the cold anger there, draws him back like a line and this time it is she that steps near, closer than he, and he lets her. How hot her skin is upon his own; how it feels like thievery, to steal just a moment of touch, to wonder how long it will last. Oh, Moira Tonnerre and her contradictions! Asterion cannot keep up with her, changing like smoke, leaping like sparks, as different between moments as the colors in a fire.
“I said nothing about a cage, or going back to Denocte.” To her rage he murmurs reason - the king has learned, at last, that if he does not state his own meaning others will fill in the words for him, and in their tongues they might mean anything. “For your people, then, stay safe. They would suffer to see you hurt - and so would I.” He might have touched her, then, but she is already withdrawing - and yet opening up, too, spreading those glorious wings, and to him she is the strangest, loveliest creature on the island, as unknowable as any bird with bloodstone eyes.
Against she is shifting, a bloom ever bending to its own private sun, leaning on its own breezes. It is a marvel, to him, all the emotions she displays in a moment, even when she will not meet his eye; there is enough to read in the fall of her hair, the line of her neck, the light glancing off the plane of her cheek or pooling in the shallow hollow above her eye.
At last she turns back and the bay meets her eyes again, bright-burning to his dark. She looks for challenge but he can only agree; what she names is the same feeling that has wound around his own heart like a golden thread and tugged. Call it magic, like calling to like, but whatever it is he is nodding, not disagreeing; he has never thought her breakable, never thought her soft. Only precious, and worth protecting, a wild flame he would die before he saw blown out (and yet is he not the water? Perhaps it is another reason for his refusal, how sure he is he would smother her to cold ash).
“Then you understand why I am here.” His words are soft in answer, the soothe of the sea over hot sand; but his eyes flash like moonlight on whitecaps when she calls him My King. Oh, doesn’t she know how much he’d longed to hear that, when first they met? That she might have stayed in Dusk, made him truly her King, and then - ?
His skin is still too hot in the humidity of the island; it remembers too well being pressed against hers. He wants to close up the space between them and learn with her all the things a king and a man should know, he wants to vanish like Neerja to hunt the forest, to find a prey he can fell, a problem he can solve. It frustrates him, this wanting; it turns calm waters into churning, frothing waves. He steps nearer, silent on the thick, rich earth. Has her fire caught him, or does he burn with his own?
“Don’t call me that, Moira. You only just reminded me I’ve no right to command you, or expect you to obey my will.” His eyes promise a challenge, but he doesn’t know the rules, or the stakes, or the game that they play; only that it is for the best, that the phoenix lives in Denocte, and not his own kingdom. What a treasonous subject she would be - already she makes him want to defy his own head, his own heart.
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