asterion*
She doesn’t answer him, leaving his question lingering, hanging in the dim corner of her room. He remembers that it has always been like this with her (except for the last time, declaring themselves where there was no one to hear them but a hundred strange birds with jewels for eyes and the wind sighing through the leaves). Partial answers, or none at all; enough to guess at how she feels but not enough to know.
Or maybe he’s just always been terrible at reading the meaning in her pauses, her glances, her redirections. It doesn’t occur to him, not yet, that Moira has learned the inevitability of an ending, that fighting to hold on only makes the rending cut deeply enough to scar.
What do you want, Asterion?
Oh, a thousand things. But foremost among them he wants for her voice not to have broken at his name like a wave over a jagged rock, not to look at her and see tears glistening on her cheeks and know it is his doing. He wants never to have hurt her.
For the first time he wonders if he should have come here at all. And when Moira tells him to sit, and motions to her bed, Asterion steps nearer but shakes his head. It isn’t that its too intimate, but too strange; the walls, the curtains, the frame of the bed, even the pillows feel too unnatural after his time in that other world. He feels half-feral, like he no longer belongs indoors - he pushes away the thought before wondering where else he doesn’t fit.
When he does answer her, he does so softly, in a voice that hardly rises to the lights drifting above them. He looks out the window, or at the twitching tail of the tiger, or anywhere but Moira’s thin and weary face. “I want to tell you that I’m home, and that I’m so sorry. That I never meant to leave like that. Flora asked me to come with her to meet my father in the world she was born in. The island’s magic was stronger than hers. It shattered the knife that lets her move between worlds. There was no other door. I know that a year is…a terribly long time. It was not a year to me.” Asterion pauses to breathe and feels like he’s underwater, his lungs battling the inhale. He lifts his gaze again to hers. “I want to know if what we said when we parted is still true.”
Nothing is the same as when he left. Isra and Eik are gone to war. Thana and Marisol don’t want to see him. His sister is still in that other world. Cirrus is missing. How can he expect this to be the same? How can he ask for the chance to break her all over again?
“Tell me, Moira,” he says. There is pleading in his eyes - but Asterion doesn’t know if he’s asking let me go or let me stay.
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