[AW] if winter had the courage

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

Florentine feels him following, close, his toes to her heels. There is something comforting in their proximity and the way they peer into worlds together. What they see fill their minds with what might have beens and what will come to be, here, within this twisting, turning world. Florentine does not need to look at another world to think how easy it would have been to love Ipomoea. She has already thought, in this world, years before, how easily she could have fallen in love with him. Yet their time was never to be here, not when Messalina, Lysander and Thana lived. Even as she watches him now, she knows she would never think to go back, to live her life any differently. She was content to love Ipomoea as she does now and for all eternity.


He lays his cheek against her shoulder. His skin his warm, soft like the dawn. Fitting, Flora thinks, how being with Ipomoea is always like bathing in light - no matter how he feels the shadows within him yawn and stretch and consume. 


He wants to, he says such and it comes out with regret and yet with resigned knowing. Florentine looks upon that version of him, with wings that reach out beyond the lens of the mirror. He knows how to fly in that world, how the air feels beneath his feet and the clouds across his torso. “Not even for a moment?” Florentine asks and turns her head into him when he steps back. He magnetises her, pulls her in as he always has. The Dusk girl gravitates to him in need and companionship. 


Her smile grows across her lips, even as he presses her dagger back against her chest. “I can have you back, to this very moment, as if you have never been gone,” It is impish, impulsive, playful, yet all the while beneath her smile, she knows, she knows this is not his time. Yet still she seduces Ipomoea with her magic and the chance to flee his life, just for a moment. It is as much for her as for him - for her to forget the grief of losing her children, him to forget the death, the violence…


But this is not their time.


Florentine knows it, in the way she knows so many things about Time and Fate. 


The smile slips off her lips and she walks to him until they are nose to nose. Lifting her chin she holds the gaze of her oldest friend. She knows no-one here as long as him, not even her brother, Asterion. “When you are ready, Po,” Florentine whispers, “you will let me know, won’t you? I will send you then, wherever you want to go.” And she knows that it will be for the last time.



@Ipomoea

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world