the war of flowers blooming
Ipomoea has wondered if his flowers have ever felt this brand of pain.
The pain of growing too much and too fast, of thorns breaking the skin of a wild flower that never before needed to learn how to be hard, or sharp. Of bluebells blooming in an unforgiving desert, and daturas struggling to grow in a land they know they do not belong in. Of saplings that are dying as quickly as they are regrowing, upside-down and reaching for two suns that will soon abandon them.
He wonders it this is how his trees feel, when he begs the orchid to grow atop their barks and steal their life force for its own.
And still he knows he would do it again, and again, and again if it could stop his pain — their pain — from becoming his daughter's. If he could stop the magic that made her taking and taking and consuming until there was nothing left to consume, if he could fill its endless hunger with his own flesh his own flowers, it would already be done. Danaë is looking at him like he is the root upon which a brighter world might grow and he does not have the heart to wonder what it might turn to when he cannot save this world.
He wants to tell her that softness never feels like bravery, not until after you have already cut the lines of it from your bones trying to be brave without it. But instead he leans his shoulder against her’s to catch her as she wilts, and says, “that is when we must learn to be.” And he hums the words even when he wants to scream them. Even when he wants to wilt beside her he makes himself grow taller, makes his flowers bloom brighter, makes his magic curl around her stuttering sapling until it reaches as far down as his, until his grows beside her’s like it would die without it (and maybe it would.)
His skin feels just as cold as the star-tears rising in waves against their bellies. It aches to sink below a sea of sorrow and lie there not like the root of hope growing through the world, but the bitter one. It wants to reach for the rage to fill the sadness like a storm, and each time there’s thunder he can feel it humming in his blood like he is the lightning striking the earth. But he is not ready to become that. Not yet, not yet, not when his daughter needs him, needs to learn to be brave, needs to learn there is as much softness in joy as there is in sorrow.
“Then I will help you learn to become it,” he whispers in the hollow above her eyes. And he lets that promise become a lullaby, as it carries them through the sea of sorrow like they are the only bit of sand and shore keeping it at bay. And even when the two saplings shudder and stop growing behind them, he lets the water-poppies and hyacinth and dahlia bob like ships against their legs, sailing to a new land with them.
The pain of growing too much and too fast, of thorns breaking the skin of a wild flower that never before needed to learn how to be hard, or sharp. Of bluebells blooming in an unforgiving desert, and daturas struggling to grow in a land they know they do not belong in. Of saplings that are dying as quickly as they are regrowing, upside-down and reaching for two suns that will soon abandon them.
He wonders it this is how his trees feel, when he begs the orchid to grow atop their barks and steal their life force for its own.
And still he knows he would do it again, and again, and again if it could stop his pain — their pain — from becoming his daughter's. If he could stop the magic that made her taking and taking and consuming until there was nothing left to consume, if he could fill its endless hunger with his own flesh his own flowers, it would already be done. Danaë is looking at him like he is the root upon which a brighter world might grow and he does not have the heart to wonder what it might turn to when he cannot save this world.
He wants to tell her that softness never feels like bravery, not until after you have already cut the lines of it from your bones trying to be brave without it. But instead he leans his shoulder against her’s to catch her as she wilts, and says, “that is when we must learn to be.” And he hums the words even when he wants to scream them. Even when he wants to wilt beside her he makes himself grow taller, makes his flowers bloom brighter, makes his magic curl around her stuttering sapling until it reaches as far down as his, until his grows beside her’s like it would die without it (and maybe it would.)
His skin feels just as cold as the star-tears rising in waves against their bellies. It aches to sink below a sea of sorrow and lie there not like the root of hope growing through the world, but the bitter one. It wants to reach for the rage to fill the sadness like a storm, and each time there’s thunder he can feel it humming in his blood like he is the lightning striking the earth. But he is not ready to become that. Not yet, not yet, not when his daughter needs him, needs to learn to be brave, needs to learn there is as much softness in joy as there is in sorrow.
“Then I will help you learn to become it,” he whispers in the hollow above her eyes. And he lets that promise become a lullaby, as it carries them through the sea of sorrow like they are the only bit of sand and shore keeping it at bay. And even when the two saplings shudder and stop growing behind them, he lets the water-poppies and hyacinth and dahlia bob like ships against their legs, sailing to a new land with them.
