we’re trapped in a garden of endless flowers
There had been a way in which his soul moved once, like it was soil instead of sand, the sweet smell of a cactus’ flower instead of the bite of its spines. When he had been able to pretend the only thing calling out to his heart was the promise of the earth shaping itself into a home, where deserts were less than a memory, less than a shadow, less than a whisper spoken not in words, but in the spaces between heartbeats while he was sleeping.
It had been easier once, to pretend he was not every bit as sharp-edged and weathered as any sandstone wall shaped by the desert wind. That he was not formed of the same sun-bleached bones as all the others in this place.
But now being tugged through the party with Thana’s tail wrapped tightly around his hock, he cannot stop looking at all of their faces. And he cannot stop looking for himself in them, for the pieces he might recognize reflected in their eyes. And that bit of desert stuck in his soul sighs, and licks its teeth, and whispers we are home as it stretches out to fill his veins.
Home. In all the violence, all the hardness, all the life-defying-death moving in the ways only a desert knows how to.
So he lets himself be pulled along to her like a bit of driftwood following a current (she would always be the current he is caught in, he sees that now). And he knows his soul is moving to a different beat when the thunder echoing in Thana’s touch makes him lean only in instead of away. Where once he might have hated that, where once he might have torn away and run back to his forests, and his wildflower meadows, and his earth that knew only how to speak in petals and softness —
now, oh now Ipomoea is tracing every hard line of a stallion’s face like he is memorizing a battlefield. Like he is relearning again and again how to turn flowers into weapons by which he can carve the rage from another man’s skin.
Like he has forgotten that to take one man’s rage away is to multiply it with his own.
He presses his lips to Thana’s shoulder in a way that would be too hard to be called a kiss for anyone else. “The way all soldiers die,” he presses the words into her skin hard enough that she might feel the teeth behind it, the whisper of a warning that the desert-borne thing he has tried so hard to keep locked away has only been wearing away at the chains.
“At the end of a sword.”
Tonight he hopes that sword is forged only in the shape of a unicorn’s horn, carving out monsters from the world.
Ipomoea has stopped wondering if it makes him more or less of a monster himself.
"wilting // blooming"
@thana
It had been easier once, to pretend he was not every bit as sharp-edged and weathered as any sandstone wall shaped by the desert wind. That he was not formed of the same sun-bleached bones as all the others in this place.
But now being tugged through the party with Thana’s tail wrapped tightly around his hock, he cannot stop looking at all of their faces. And he cannot stop looking for himself in them, for the pieces he might recognize reflected in their eyes. And that bit of desert stuck in his soul sighs, and licks its teeth, and whispers we are home as it stretches out to fill his veins.
Home. In all the violence, all the hardness, all the life-defying-death moving in the ways only a desert knows how to.
So he lets himself be pulled along to her like a bit of driftwood following a current (she would always be the current he is caught in, he sees that now). And he knows his soul is moving to a different beat when the thunder echoing in Thana’s touch makes him lean only in instead of away. Where once he might have hated that, where once he might have torn away and run back to his forests, and his wildflower meadows, and his earth that knew only how to speak in petals and softness —
now, oh now Ipomoea is tracing every hard line of a stallion’s face like he is memorizing a battlefield. Like he is relearning again and again how to turn flowers into weapons by which he can carve the rage from another man’s skin.
Like he has forgotten that to take one man’s rage away is to multiply it with his own.
He presses his lips to Thana’s shoulder in a way that would be too hard to be called a kiss for anyone else. “The way all soldiers die,” he presses the words into her skin hard enough that she might feel the teeth behind it, the whisper of a warning that the desert-borne thing he has tried so hard to keep locked away has only been wearing away at the chains.
“At the end of a sword.”
Tonight he hopes that sword is forged only in the shape of a unicorn’s horn, carving out monsters from the world.
Ipomoea has stopped wondering if it makes him more or less of a monster himself.
@thana
