like flowers
we can also choose to bloom
we can also choose to bloom
I
pomoea knows the prayer in her eyes without her ever speaking a word. He’s whispered the same prayer over and over again to himself - beside a lake in another court, on an island wrought from magic, in a desert made of monsters. Some days still when he looks out across the gardens and hears nothing but silence, and sees nothing but shadows stalking between the trees of his forest, still the prayer is never far from his lips.
But here in this meadow, he has never needed to pray.
The flowers had always been prayer enough, the way they lifted their petals like hands to worship the sun more holy than any sermon he had sat in listening to. Here there was warmth, and growth, and an entire meadow filled of interlocked roots that whispered of the wind, and the sky, and the water summer storms brought. Ipomoea could lie down amongst them and feel, for a moment, like his roots were their roots and he was as much a part of the earth as the grasses were. Here was the one place he had always felt strong enough.
It strikes him as sad then, that not everyone felt the same.
He stops when she speaks again, and his placement feels so precarious, so unstable, like he was barely saved from sinking down, down, down into the earth had she only told him to leave. The flowers press themselves eagerly against him, twining themselves around his legs. Steadying him. He begins to wonder if it’s that unspoken prayer again, the same one in his heart, in her’s.
He is quiet still, as she begins to speak, like the words are more to reassure herself than him. A thousand reassurances die on his tongue the moment he thinks to voice them, leaving only the quiet wind whistling through the flowers in the pauses between their breaths. But the way she bends to greet the flowers, the way marvel blossoms over her features even over the fear, and the anxiety, and the unknown - it is so familiar to him, achingly familiar.
"It’s not foolish at all." There’s a smile playing at the corners of his lips, a knowing one, a sad one, a smile that wants nothing more than to fall away and disappear between those very flowers. These flowers have always made for good company, too, for those who need it."
The magic is bleeding out of him as he speaks, and the flowers around them shiver in response. Slowly, as if reluctantly, those pressed against his skin begin to peel themselves away, petal by petal, leaf by fragile leaf - and turn towards her, instead. His half-smile widens into something sincere, something almost shy.
"This is the Illuster Meadow, center of the Dawn Court," the flowers seem to dance, as if to say yes, yes, yes, and press themselves as hungrily to the stranger’s skin as they had to his.
"A place of peace," he adds, and his eyes, his voice, the flowers he commands - all of it are begging her to believe it just as much as he does.
@solstice "speaks" <3
