you be the wind
i'll be the wildflower
i'll be the wildflower
Ipomoea feels like a moth, like he’s drowning in her ocean and longing for water. Even here, when he’s supposed to be the one bringing death and not the one wilting before a flame, still he can’t help but reach for her. And if there had ever been a part of him that had thought better of chasing after a unicorn as she left trails of rot and dying things in her wake, it was silent now.
Because when she presses herself against him like they had been holding each other together all along, he starts to feel more alive than ever before. If Thana is coming undone at his touch, he is only being put back together again, as if all the wayward parts of him that had never let him rest, that never let him stay for long in any one place without beginning to wonder what lay waiting for him somewhere else, as if all the pieces of his heart that had ever longed for another life were at last content to be right here with their skin pressed against one another. If Thana is finding any comfort in the air turning blacker and heavier with each of his breaths, it is the way she breathes pollen and fresh air back to him that keeps him from collapsing into dust.
And he starts to think that if death has been home for her, he would gladly stay here for her, stay here where the rot magic makes everything else he loves wilt away. There was a beauty he was finding in its impermanence, she was teaching him that.
Until the island reformed itself, and reformed him along with it, he could make himself forget about the killers he needed to find and the kingdom he needed to lead, and how the forest and the meadow cried out every time it saw them together.
He knows all the things he should say, and all the things he wants to say - just as much as he knows that each of them are wrong. Delumine, the island, her, Denocte, even the desert - always Ipomoea has found a way to be at home wherever he found himself, but never for long. Always he was running, running away, or back, running between homes and worlds and versions of himself. He was different between all those places, he knew, oh he knew - as if each place had managed to grow roots in him, to make him belong even when he shouldn’t/
I don’t think I have a home, he almost tells her, but that too, feels wrong, like a betrayal to all the places he has loved before the island.
”I used to want a thousand different homes, and I looked for them everywhere,” he tells her instead, ”But none of them ever felt like home for long.”
Maybe he has put his heart in too many places; but something deeper is telling him they have only ever been substitutes. He shivers against her, presses his lips to her pollen-dusted cheek, and wonders if his flowers have ever felt to her the way her life-filled moss and seeds feel to him now. And it is that thought that has him smiling against her skin.
”This could be my home, if only for tonight.”
The way he says it makes it sound like he’s talking about her, instead of the island, even as he turns and begins to lead her through the bluegrass forest, past a thousand flowers he almost doesn’t notice while he’s looking at her.
@thana
Because when she presses herself against him like they had been holding each other together all along, he starts to feel more alive than ever before. If Thana is coming undone at his touch, he is only being put back together again, as if all the wayward parts of him that had never let him rest, that never let him stay for long in any one place without beginning to wonder what lay waiting for him somewhere else, as if all the pieces of his heart that had ever longed for another life were at last content to be right here with their skin pressed against one another. If Thana is finding any comfort in the air turning blacker and heavier with each of his breaths, it is the way she breathes pollen and fresh air back to him that keeps him from collapsing into dust.
And he starts to think that if death has been home for her, he would gladly stay here for her, stay here where the rot magic makes everything else he loves wilt away. There was a beauty he was finding in its impermanence, she was teaching him that.
Until the island reformed itself, and reformed him along with it, he could make himself forget about the killers he needed to find and the kingdom he needed to lead, and how the forest and the meadow cried out every time it saw them together.
He knows all the things he should say, and all the things he wants to say - just as much as he knows that each of them are wrong. Delumine, the island, her, Denocte, even the desert - always Ipomoea has found a way to be at home wherever he found himself, but never for long. Always he was running, running away, or back, running between homes and worlds and versions of himself. He was different between all those places, he knew, oh he knew - as if each place had managed to grow roots in him, to make him belong even when he shouldn’t/
I don’t think I have a home, he almost tells her, but that too, feels wrong, like a betrayal to all the places he has loved before the island.
”I used to want a thousand different homes, and I looked for them everywhere,” he tells her instead, ”But none of them ever felt like home for long.”
Maybe he has put his heart in too many places; but something deeper is telling him they have only ever been substitutes. He shivers against her, presses his lips to her pollen-dusted cheek, and wonders if his flowers have ever felt to her the way her life-filled moss and seeds feel to him now. And it is that thought that has him smiling against her skin.
”This could be my home, if only for tonight.”
The way he says it makes it sound like he’s talking about her, instead of the island, even as he turns and begins to lead her through the bluegrass forest, past a thousand flowers he almost doesn’t notice while he’s looking at her.
@thana
