IPOMOEA
let's be wildflowers
H
is heart is still dancing - so fast, so haphazard, missing beats it knows from years and years of recital. He thinks it might break, and then what? The desert would claim another, one more soul lost to Raum’s reign. But he doesn’t let it. The deserts had failed to take him once before; why then, should they be allowed to now?Instead he lives, perhaps because of or, even more likely, in spite of the desert. Even now he causes life to flourish where the sun and the sand and the heat have strangled out everything but the hardiest of plants, and he does so with barely a thought. The fig tree claws its way out of the desert and stands, proudly, as its fruits swell and ripen and tough desert grass sprouts around its base. It’s one of dozens, raised up seemingly overnight.
Ipomoea does not know how long his magic will sustain them, but he knows that every bit of food he can bring to a court of the starving is worth every bit of death and exhaustion he’s seen.
He looks into the stallion’s eyes - a red so similar to his own, it’s a wonder how he doesn’t see the same roses and cherries in them as others have claimed to see in his. And he smiles as he plucks a fig from the small tree’s outstretched arms.
“I am Ipomoea,” he says, and the name sounds more like a commitment as it falls from his tongaue, spoken in full for the first time in months as he named himself.
Because to him, it was not simply an introduction; he had shied from his own name for months now while living in the Night Court, like a dog shaking loose its collar so that it might wander free and without guilt. In the midst of finding himself he had had to first deny that which he was, a name that tied him to what he perceived then as a source of shame. And now, having finally reconciled himself with his purpose, he was putting the pieces of himself back together and in the process, claiming each one as an inseparable part of himself.
It did not feel odd to him, that he might renew himself in a place he had once run in fear from. It simply felt right, like fate had finally bitten its own tail and completed the circle.
The fig is rich and honey-sweet when he bites into it, wetting his tongue for the first time all morning and that, too, feels proper.
“And your name is?” he prompts.
Maybe fate is laughing, but all he hears is the wind whistling through the desert’s dunes.
@ramses | "speaks" | notes: making all my replies out of order oops
