some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
At least in this lifetime
The orphan boy does not blink at her strange words. Though he has been alone for much of his short life, his blood is nothing but otherworldly. He had lost his mother to time travel. His mother who has lived and still lives and has yet to live so many parallel lives. She exists in so many different planes. The boy still remembers tales of her adventures, they are so deep within his identity as the son of a god and a time traveller that they are engraved upon his bones and sewed into the threads that bind his essence together.
“How many lives have you lived?” He asks awkwardly, with his voice that is low and then at once high. The boy gazes out across the ice to the skaters who trip and fall and laugh and dance. Only as a skater floats by, their blades cutting feathers into the ice, does he turn his gaze back upon the strangeling girl. Her smile is bright and radiant, enough to rival the storm they danced within. Oh, she took to that strange night far better than he here.
Though Leonidas has grown up a boy alone and thus vulnerable to selfishness, he still feels the way the air changes, the way she changes when she asks him what he wants to do. Take you to the woods, is what the fae-boy wants to say. But he does not. Not when he sees how she smiles, small and earnest, keen, yet holding back. Nic had been watching the dancers too keenly and Leonidas is as observant as a stag overlooking his wild kingdom. He sees every threat. The way she watched the skaters had been a threat. Yet every great king makes sacrifices. This, he realises is his.
“Shall we skate?” He murmurs, at once relieved when his voice does not break in the strange way it is wont lately to do. Arching his neck, his body growing tall and proud as if his to face some strange and deadly foe, the wild-wood boy leads her to the ice. “Have you done this before?” He does not like how often he is speaking, he likes it less when he finishes his question with a voice low and deep and odd. He blushes and huffs his discontent.
@
