in sunshine and in shadow
He has not realized before how much easier it is, to stand here beneath an archway of trees and feel the wind against his skin than to be in his own city, his own halls, with a crown on his head and his people around him. How it is hard for him to be honest - to be himself - surrounding by the evidence of a life he’d never imagined, buildings of stone and streets of cobbles, tended gardens instead of the wildflowers he’d always known. Here, with the sigh and shiver of the leaves, the hum of magic and the taste of it on the air, bitter and faint, the potential of danger on the other side of each clearing -
he feels himself. Just a man, and nothing more, and suddenly he is weary of it, all the holding back for the sake of a kingdom he never claimed, a life he fell into instead of chose. They face one another (one burning like a flung star, one still but deep as an ocean trench) and when she says I would drown for you his eyes press closed, his breath sighs out as the birds sing overhead.
It is a frightening thing, to consider telling her the thoughts that churn inside him like offshore waves, half-formed and changing like mist. A frightening thing, when he himself has failed to untangle his knotted feelings, his frustration and want, his worry that love is a thing he has broken too many times (beginning with Talia - always with Talia, soul-sister, the golden twin whose heartbeat was his lullaby before he met the world). How the harder he tried to love, to hold on, the faster she and Aislinn slipped away, wild things that thrashed against his hands, caught birds that bit until he let them go. (Where are they now? It is has been a long time since he wondered, though his heart tells him every day: gone, gone, gone.)
As she continues - baring her own heart, if he lets himself believe it - his eyes open again, lifting from the cool green around them, deep shadows and golden light, to Moira standing crimson, a beckoning flame. In passionate, poetic words she proclaims, and thought neither of them have moved the space between them is shrinking, weighted, until even the symphony of insects and frogs and birds and wildcats and whatever waits and hunts in the jungle is only a background murmur.
Then there is silence between them, waiting, taut. A perfect surface like a lake waiting to be disturbed. What ripple, what wave, would come? Asterion pulls in a breath that tastes of salt and brine, of green and growing things, of magic under all of it like the core of the world. He thinks of all the secrets he’s kept in his heart and how they’ll never grow in that fallow soil, with no light and no wind and no sky to reach for. And when he speaks at last he doesn’t look like a painting or a king or anything at all but a man, half-wild with his hair loose and his body scarred and his eyes like the eyes of a thing both hunting and haunted.
“Oh, Moira.” He shapes the name like a wave, smooth and wide and soft, and like a wave it erodes him, crumbles away some of his uncertainty. Court borders mean little in the face of this feeling. Standing here with the mainland so distant it might be a dream, he believes her. Standing here in a jungle where he hunts a king and a killer though he has no claim to, he believes her. All of a sudden the entire idea of courts seems foolish, for how is it different than the island?- everyone he loves and cares for, sharing the same piece of ground. Where moments ago this place seemed impossible, miraculous, now it is those invisible rules that seem imaginary, absurd. Only this is real - only the two of them. And so he is honest, holding onto her gaze like he is the drowning one.
“I worry that you’ll change your mind about me. Or that I-" silence unrolls behind the words, an uncharacteristic pause. Or that I what? he asks himself, but he can find no answers - except there is the memory of Leto, of Thana, of Euryale and Calliope. Of more. Of every moment where time hung suspended, where a touch or a look made his heart race and his thoughts churn if, if, if. But it is not them he thinks of when he’s alone, or watching the wild sea, or writing a letter in his heart that will never be sent. Asterion pulls in another breath, begins again.
“I’ve seen what love can do when it turns sour. I’ve had it turn to ashes. I suppose that I’m afraid, Moira, that if it happens to us the damage to our courts could be…monstrous. And I’m afraid that - that I’m the one who causes it. That I love wrong, somehow.”
It is this that he is remembering: late afternoon, sunlight shifting and bare branches drawing patterns against the sky. Himself dark, star-spangled, calm and sure - his twin golden, burning, her eyes a raging sea against his placid one. Himself saying I’ll follow you wherever you go. And her reply, with tears, with teeth: I will kill you if you do.
And of a summer night with fire on the horizon, and ash on the sea like snow, and he and Aislinn choosing their courts over each other. Of a love shattered by duty and distrust, all the rotten roots between Dusk and Night. Had those roots been burned away - could that be enough?
Standing here with only Moira, both their castles and lands a distant dream, it feels like it might be.
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