I am not like any ordinary world
Asterion pushes his nephew into that secret, overgrown garden. They traverse an aged path of uneven dreams and broken hopes. His uncle forces the boy to look upon the wild weeds that grow protectively about his memories. The roots grow virulent and they hide from Leonidas all the things he does not wish to see. He wants this place to grow wild, secret, forgotten.
Everyone has a family. No, they don’t. Leonidas fights, like a lion cub caught within a bear trap. He snarls against the sharp teeth of remembrance that cut into his fragile, solitary existence. It is easier to go on not remembering but the time for forgetting is over.
Your mother loves you very much. The wild wood boy falls as still as a fawn beneath an eagle’s shadow. His mother. The mere concept inspired something warm within him, a moment of peace before his stomach turns sour. He spent a year without her. Leonidas cannot remember how she sounded, how she really looked. Her face is a smudge upon an old picture fondly opened and closed too many times. The boy remembers his gold is his mother’s his brown his fathers. But that is all.
Loves. She is still alive. And maybe that is what hurts the most.
“I don’t have a mother.” Leonidas says again, firmly, bitter as the winter wind that gathers at the fringes of Novus. He denies her and yet, yet, “Why is she not here, with you?” He asks, small tentative, wary. He presses back the weeds that choke her memory, he fears what he might find of her beneath the grimy layers of tears and loneliness and struggling youth. If his uncle made it back, why not her? Why was she not the first to return?
Asterion talks of home and through the film of his silver tears Leonidas merely watches, blank, unmoved. What is a home? The idea means nothing to a boy who roams and sleeps wherever his head falls - beneath the stars, beneath the rain, beneath leaves, beneath stone.
“I have no home either.” The feral boy breathes standing still as a stag. His home is his wood, his sprawling kingdom he lays claim to each night he lays his head upon the earth and dreams of wilder things than families and friends.
“But you can stay.” Leonidas’ voice wavers, unsure. He sees the pain upon his uncle’s face and maybe it is the compassion of his mother, her brother, her father that makes him pause and offer his companionship.
“If you tell me more about my family.” And maybe his garden is not so secret any more. Maybe he realises that others have been living there before him, cultivating it, growing love like buds. They just forgot his corner like he forgot theirs.
@Asterion
