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.
Fat, grey pigeons were loud in trees when wild-wood boys wanted to sleep. They flapped their wings and bustled along branches and poohed and cooed, loud and uncouth. Annoying. Leonidas would be horrified to know how she thinks of them when she looks at him. It would be enough to wound a hormonal boy’s pride.
She smiles at the breaking of his voice and it seems his pride is to be wounded anyway. He snaps his gaze away from her, his chin lifting, his nape arching, his breath leaving in a shy, humiliated huff. He looks back to her though, when she says that she is real (as if to assure himself, as if he needs to see and not just hear it from her lips). He drinks in the silver of her skin, so much like moonlight, so much like that awful silver magic that turned them from real into phantom. He hopes she is more than just liquid moonlight and dappled starlight. His touch affirms it.
Leonidas likes touching her but, oh, when she turns to look at him he falters, unsure whether to draw back or stay with his lips pressed to the curve of her back. Apsara points her spiral horn toward his breast, over his heart. It is a threat that runs alongside that look. Slowly, warily he withdraws his mouth from her unsure when, how, he crossed a boundary. How, the uncouth boy wonders, should he know what touch is allowable and what is not? She has touched him before, but it has always been rough, startling… was that how he should be with her? His head shakes, he does not want to be rough with her like that. It is so startling when she touches him that way - even if it makes his heart startle with joy at their contact.
His antlers lower, slowly, carefully to press upon her horn. He knows the violence of her threat, he can already feel the ache of it within his growing chest. Wary eyes, bright and gold, watch her as a tine touches the curve of her horn. There is no ringing tap this time, like they shared in peril and joy before. This is something deeper, more worrisome even than when the colt came to steal their existence. They are indeed forever different. Leonidas knows he will leave Denocte changed, for better or worse. His horn to hers feels like a vow he does not fully comprehend - how can he when all he knows is new and strange, at once exciting and thrilling and yet terrifying and agonising?
Sovereign. Apsara says of her mother and the wild-wood boy thinks of his uncle and his earliest memories. “Like my uncle.” Leonidas says, nodding understandingly. The boy says nothing of his mother whose past sovereignty he never learned of. He does not know how his blood is deeply woven into Terrastella, how it has been shed many times upon its earth. Even if he did, he would not recognise the ties that bind him there, not when his body, his heart, his soul belong upon a bed of leaves, beneath the ceiling of trees and a sky full of stars. Leonidas would sooner beg this princess into the feral-free woods with him than spend time within a city, beneath a ceiling of stone and upon a bed of cloth.
He does not know how she fights against society and stereotypes. He does not know how she lets the nickname ‘princess’ slide from her like water. Raised on the outside of society, Leonidas has not felt the ways in which is tries to mold everyone within its grasp. But the closer his new friendships draw him to the courts and and their cities, he will begin to feel societies pressure upon him. It will force change upon him like the cliff yields to the sea - slow and yet at once sudden. It begins with Aspara’s whisper, Did you steal it?
The boy looks to her with wide, uncivilised eyes. He sees how she draws back from him, how she takes the necklace off hurriedly with a blush upon her cheeks as if the mere idea of wearing it is awful. Aspara is angry. It blooms lovely across her skin but oh, Leonidas snorts softly, confused by her sudden change in demeanor, confused by the word steal. “No.” He whispers reaching forward wanting her to keep it on, but halted by that wave of anger and embarrassment that ripples from her slender body. The air crackles with it, it skips along his skin like static before a storm. He shivers and stiffens as he straightens, growing taller, braver, bolder, a wild, forest boy staring down a predator with fearless bright eyes.
Then, at once, she softens like the dawn. The purple bruising of her ire upon his skin turns softly, sweetly golden. Leonidas shifts, his lips pressed into a line, his ears fallen flat upon his skull. He could pass for a man in that moment - another of those strange, fleeting moments where childhood slips from him, obscured by blossoming adulthood. But it is just a moment (even though these moments grow ever more frequent, ever longer as time canters him in toward adulthood faster and faster). He turns into a boy again, older and young all at once. Even little children know not to steal, but not adolescent boys who raised themselves beneath the stars and at will picked berries from bushes and fruits from trees and cropped any grasses that found their way beneath his feet. There is no such thing as stealing to boys like Leonidas.
“No?” He asks, his voice belonging to the man he was a moment ago, yet filled with a boy’s confusion. Leonidas knows nothing of how a man toiled over the pretty piece to sell and feed his family. He has no concept of money, he owns not a penny (except that he does, except that his mother was a queen once and earned her wealth across time and space). Leonidas is so very wealthy, but even if he knew he was, he would reject it all for the wilds of Novus and picking berries off twigs.
“Put it back on.” He implores her, suddenly pained with her rejection of his gift. Her sadness, her anger they are like lances into the softer places of him. It hurts and he writhes against the discomfort. “Please.” He remembers what his uncle told him suddenly, about how he should say please and thank you.
You know you can’t just take things...right? “But I want you to have it.” Still that frown is deep and worried and hurt upon his brow. He stands no longer a stag in his kingdom but a fox uneasy in a lair of dogs. The market sounds too busy, too loud, too smelly. She will one day say her heart is not like a butterfly but like a tree, still and then moving, sweeping, rustling, its susurrations whispering through her body like the sound does through the woods. Leonidas has spent a thousand days beneath the trees listening to their whispers, he would know, he would love how her heart sounds. But his own, his own is a brave, stag’s heart. It runs defiant and alert, defensive and bold.
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