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.
It is easy for a boy who has lived his life alone to be in control of nearly everything around him. It is hard for him then to be so utterly out of control. Stood within the busy street, uncomfortable already, here only for a girl who now chides him, it is easy for him to feel so utterly powerless.
You don’t know me, she says and, oh, those words strike him like lightning. They set his nerves alight, electricity coursing through his veins. He thinks she is one of only 2 he does know. And if he does not know her, then does he know anyone at all?
Oh, Apsara, you shut him back in his woodland with such a comment. You build him a solitary cage of vines and thorns. You place him back in that lonely, quiet place he grew up where he forgot his family, his twin. He snaps his head away, as if struck. Leonidas knows nothing of love, attraction or hormones. He does not know that she is as conflicted as he. The boy is as wild as a doe, understanding only the language of survival, learning only how to interact with the things that keep him alive. These are the things he understands, not girls who push him one moment, smile at him others and then tell him he does not know her.
Worst of all is the fluctuating frustration that blooms like a black rose within his belly. It grows fast as bamboo and sets its thorns painfully into the weakest parts of himself. He turns from her, as if her observation was a sentence. It feels like one, to him, to a boy who lives alone.
She tells him she does not need what he offers. If Leonidas were not so hurt, if he was not bubbling with an adolescent boy’s rage, he might have realised her meaning. He would have preferred to give her something different anyway - a flower of the wood, not something unyielding and cold like the metal of the necklace. Oh, if only he could throw it away, let it sink to the bottom of the sea! Be rid of the horrible thing!
His ears are upon his skull, his neck arched, thick muscles bulging with adulthood that brims within him. But the way he watches her, the way he moves beside her, is suddenly leonine with a teenaged ire.
Leonidas feels like a string pulled tight, so tight it stretches his skin taught. It pulls on him, he feels like he might snap. All around him the Court reminds him how loud, how garish everything is. It reminds him of all the things he does not understand like laughter, like love.
And then, oh and then, as he stands tall and proud and still as a statue of a stag, Apsara smiles. She smiles bright and joyful for the man she gives her necklace back to smiles too. The man is overjoyed, tears glisten upon his cheeks. And Leonidas is retreating, his chin drawing into his chest, his mane falling across his eyes, a barrier, a gesture so much like the mother he barely knows anymore. Their exchange, Apsara and the merchant’s, is the press of a blade upon the string that pulls leonidas so tight. It nicks the smallest cut into the taught string of him, but he snaps.
Leonidas shatters like water tumbling from a waterfall (he has been falling since she took her necklace from about her throat) and striking the rocks below. He hates that he does not understand why. Loathes that he tried to fit in to society and only failed. Despises that this whole exchange is about money and people and things he cannot begin to comprehend.
The boy shatters upon the stones of her rejection - of the necklace, of his touch (touch which she has taught him to yearn). His lips peel back from white teeth and he snarls lupine and savage. Like he had the day his uncle caught him stealing apples from trees. Leonidas is so many things that the wilds birth - deer and wolves, insects that sting and birds gentle and beautiful.
He looks away from the markets, out, longingly, toward where he knows the wilderness lies, beyond the streets, the stalls, the crowds. He is a wild thing caught in the snare of a girl’s beauty, but overwhelmed, broken by the things he does not understand about girls; about this girl. Leonidas is broken by the challenges of adolescence and a society he is only just beginning to realise wishes to make him conform. But he is not made to obey anything at all.
His wings snap out with all the abruptness of unfurling sails caught in a galloping wind. The crowd scatters around him, startled away from his gleaming gold that darkens swiftly to bronze with his gathering frustration, Then, like a feral creature suddenly freed from bondage, he takes flight, little more than a wild eagle loosed of its capturing chain.
The boy is fast as he leaves her with the necklace and the merchant. He seeks the quiet solitude of Novus’ outer reaches. He does not rest until he is immersed back into reclusiveness, no matter its pain. Loneliness he has come to understand, but not unicorn girls who smile at him, some soft, some sharp as blades, some who wish to touch him, only to bring him his death and others who push and shove and show him all the ways he does not understand them or their smelly cities.
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