"Why must we be born into a world where we must spend our lives struggling to become unbreakable?”
From the corner of my gaze I had watched him dance. I do not know how to look away from bits of my memories that sit in my soul like golden stones. He is ringed with light, with grass reaching for him like a million ghosts, and I can see how he is not the same man that came to me to learn how to be brave.
This man, this king, is not who I remember.
Shadows rise around him like storms now. I know the look of them as well as I know the way dawn-light turns Eik into something holy.
But I do not go to him, not yet. I only watch him dance like a ghost remembering how heavy a heart feels and how swiftly blood can rush. Oh, I hope he rediscovers it, the innocence that felt so holy from every movement I watched him make once. But I also know how victory tastes. I know how to feels to be steel, and wrath, and monstrous so that none have to feel the burden of it.
Perhaps we are more similar now.
I have passed the point of innocence and softness. I am shattered as much as I am whole in the remaking.
There is that darkness in my eyes, the shadow of killing and mercy living in the blue like a bit of demon risen from the underneath, when I turn to look at him. It does not fade when he presses himself into my skin (brushing gently against my tremulous soul) like a wolf coming home. I smile, for the first time since I've come home I really smile. My teeth flash like weapons ringed in firefly light. “Ipomoea.” I sigh between my flashing weapon teeth and my soft-kiss smile. I do not realize I am the same sort of contradiction as him-- tragic and sharp, sorrow and wrath.
The line I trace down his cheek is a jagged and gentle thing, one as lost as the two of us. “If I am a shooting star there is no wish I would not grant you.” I do not mention that if I am star I am a dead thing blazing out the last of my glory in the atmosphere. I do not mention that I will explode into dust and nothing else. All I can do it trace a circle across his brow and hope it's a seed that might grow, and blossom, and turn us into something else but wolves, and lions, and ghosts on the outskirts of the world.
More fireflies gather in the crease of my spine and in all the hollows where our bodies to not fit together so closely. Nature anoints us in the light we have both forgotten the taste of (and the feel of it against us like cool salt-water and summer sun showers). I did not know I should have been missing this when I reveled in the sound of shattering chains. I did not know.
But I almost--
I almost remember.
“Wish Ipomoea.” I blink. All the shore turns to silver stone that glows in the night, and the fireflies seem nothing more than children of this world (found and safe where the two us are lost, lost, lost). “Wish.” I kiss his brow like a lion welcoming home a god of war. And--
Finally.
I remember.
@Ipomoea
