When the silence between blade, and marble, and unfurling petal is broken it becomes indignant in the shattering. The unicorn, still blinking to the sound of a dead and crying clock, feels that same shattering rage bloom in her chest. Inside her the indignant silence opens its bloody jaws wide enough that a lion crawls out from the belly of it.
She turns and each flower, each deadly petal, unfurls towards the boy as she does. A breeze whispers through the windows, and whistles through the dead-stones, and gathers along the dip of her spine like snow and satin. It feels like a gathering storm, a potential weight of something either profane, or monstrous, or too perfect and fragile to touch. She feels like thunder in that eclectic gathering (she feels like all the things her mother has warned her of becoming).
And she breaks inside the feelings like a shard of glass in the tide of it, rolling over and over until her edges are not made blunt but sharper. She becomes steel and hunger as much as she becomes a flower wanting only for the sun and rain.
His voice breaks and the thunder in her bones knows instinctively the rightness of it. The world will break for you, unicorn. Her mother had told her once; it was always unicorn and not Danaë. And she did not understand why she had to break anything at all.
But she understands now, as she steps from the knotted, rotten gaze towards him.
And even as she understands she cannot help this urge to weave winter jasmine between the gaps in his teeth to stitch his voice back together. What else might she grow in the divots behind his eyes then, when she might turn her attention to things other than the sound of him? Her steps bring a blooming to another statue’s gaze and they unfurl towards the boy as well.
The unicorn, who is still the unicorn, does not smile as she traces the youth in his form. To her it is still strange to see innocence look as it should, long legged and fragile enough to crack open like a lost shell she found once in the river. And even though she never possessed the innocence of true-born things, she longs for it like a petal for the stolen noon when the snow is too thick to melt.
She misses that which she never had even though she does not know the exact shape of whatever it is she is longing for.
“Hello.” The sound of her voice echoes his, exact but for the wholeness of it, as if he had howled instead of spoken. She moves closer still, close enough to count the different spectrums of color in the echo of his form.
And the unicorn wonders, as things that howl do, if his red tastes like blood or like the dawn on a hazy sky.
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