you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
He hardly hears the music playing, or the sound of the people chatting, or the serving girl offering him a flute of champagne and asking if he would like another eclair. He shakes his head once, the movement sharp and quick and dismissive, and watches her turn towards the other patrons once more.An instant later, Ipomoea doesn’t ever remember her face. It fades from his memory like water in the desert, leaving only his dry and cracked thoughts in its place.
Once he would have been smiling and laughing and indulging himself, mingling with the guests and charming them for the cause. He wouldn’t have held back, or kept to the edges of the room like he does today. But it feels like a lifetime has passed since the last time he attended a function, and he has aged a hundred years since. His smile - when he smiles, rare as it is - feels rusty and stiff, and he knows even before taking his first sip that no amount of wine will erase the deep lines etched into his face, or smooth out the sharp curve of his neck.
He wants to listen to the music instead of his own dark and worrisome thoughts - but the sound of the two opposites crashing together in his head only sets his teeth together tightly. He grinds his jaw as a vein in his temple begins to throb. And then his heartbeat is adding its own discordant strains to the din, dancing alongside the viola, melancholy and ambition, one wailing and the other strumming, sharp peaks and hollow valleys, opposites that dance just off-beat with one another.
It’s only when intermission causes a break at last that Ipomoea can escape his duties - and it comes not a moment too soon, as his thoughts turn ever darker and he begins to wonder how the room might react if his skull were to split open right then and there.
He all but runs from the small acoustic room, the warbling tunes of the next band reverberating off the walls and chasing him out.
But the throbbing in his head and the pounding of his chest doesn’t stop as the doors close at last behind him. If anything the tempo only continues to pick up, rising and rising like the magic in his veins that has the flowers tapping at him through the closed windows, begging to be let in.
His wings are fluttering at his ankles like they’d like nothing more than to fly far, far away from here. So without stopping to consider where he’s going or why, Ipomoea begins to walk. The sound of his hooves clacking against the marble floor is soothing: constant, even, if a little hurried. It matches the pace of his heart as he settles into its rhythm, and as he paces through the halls he can almost forget the questions pounding against his brain, and the rage that still rests like a sleeping sand wyrm in the pit of his stomach.
Until he sees the boy cloaked in grey standing in the hallway.
His body stiffens once more as he comes to a half-stop, and the temptation to retrace his steps away from the softly-lit corridor rises. But the thought is only fleeting, as he stuffs it down alongside the beast that cracks one eye lazily open.
Ipomoea’s stride is broken now, hoofbeats ringing out unevenly as he steps down the aisle. He’s planning on walking past him at first, nodding only a little too stiffly in his direction. But something in the younger man’s face has him pausing again, staring at his eyes until a spark of recognition flashes in his own.
”You’re one of the musicians, aren’t you?” He doesn’t need to hear his answer to know he is right.
But then, feeling the tension in the silence that follows and feeling like he needs to fill the empty space - an instinct that had once come to him so easily, but now he finds the words stifled, forced - he adds, ”The violinist? You play beautifully.”
But he can hardly remember the tune now, having hardly paid it any mind even when the music had swelled around him - and he can only hope it isn’t too obvious.
@oliver i love him
“speech”
