I P O M O E A
—
H
e thinks he can hear it — that song in the meadow, twined somewhere between the star-bright lights and the petals of the flowers. He thinks he can make out its whisper, rising from somewhere beneath the magic, beneath the thread holding this world together. It feels familiar, in the way that dreams always do, cutting through his soul like a knife bleeding out his magic.But if this were a dream, Ipomoea knows there would be nothing stopping those two worlds from breaking apart into so many petals.
And he knows he would not be dancing through them, but running. He would not be something beautiful (not in his dreams, there was never any room for that in nightmares), he would be the thing that helps tear those worlds apart, pulling weeds up by their roots so that something might grow untwisted in their place.
Once he had thought she was a part of his dreams — that the golden sapling they had made grow and die and tremble with want had been only as tangible as the song that fades away every time he stops to listen. It had felt too much like coming home to have been real, like remembering a life he was supposed to have lived. Sometimes though, oh, sometimes he wonders if all his life has only ever been a dream, and if the dreams where he is the dark thing running through the shadows have been the real world all along.
But the feel of her against him, of the swell of her side and the curl of her horn and the taste of her lips — oh, Ipomoea doesn’t need to wonder which world is the real one, or which one he wants to fall into. It’s her.
“Mortal, maybe,” he whispers with black lips against her skin, even knowing that would never be true in any world she came from. Wild things like her were always more than mortal, even the ones that died. He presses a kiss against her throat, breathes her in like she’s the other world he’s been looking for all this time.
But if she wasn’t the unicorn in the wood — “Who would you want to be,” Ipomoea hopes she can feel the way his heart feels like a blackbird, beating its wings against his chest. "If you could choose the world you came from?" The way it crashes over and over into his ribs, the way all it wants is to be free (never mind the cost of escaping.) How many times had he told it to stay in there, how many times had he drawn the curtains closed and pretended to not hear the thing dying just on the other side.
But with her —
It was always with her that he wanted to let it out and remember what it felt like to run like something wild, like he knew how to fly instead of walk.
And the more he tries to listen to the song that is still whispering through the meadow, the more it starts to sound like the story of a king and his unicorn.
I can see the gardens of your soul
wild, unruly, and blooming like crazy
@thana
