I P O M O E A
—
W
hen he looks out across the night market square, he cannot stop seeing things as they were.He cannot stop seeing a king os stars with twin-moon eyes laughing with the orphans in the streets. He cannot stop seeing Reichenbach walk beside him through the citadel like the distance between their courts had been reduced to the space between their heartbeats. He cannot stop seeing a queen who had risen from a sea filled with her own sorrow teaching him to be brave, to be soft in his anger.
And he cannot stop seeing the people who had mourned beside one fire and danced beside another, and all of it, they had done together. All of it they had done with a whisper holding them together tighter than blood, a dream that reached for the stars because they had been taught to settle for nothing less.
Ipomoea looks out at the fires and the people reflected in their flames and wonders what it would have been like to stay here. Had he never gone home to steal a crown from a friend — had Grainne brought him down from the mountaintop with her instead of watching as the Dusk soldier took him to foreign lands. If he had grown up here, would he have learned to be brave without having to cut away the fear from his veins? Would he have kept reaching, and reaching, and not stopped to look out at all the darkness of space pressing in around him?
It hurts to think of all those what if’s that keep him awake in the middle of the night, but he cannot push them away. He cannot run from them, not when he has already welcomed them into his heart and made for them a home. They have become him, and Ipomoea has cut away so many pieces of himself that he thinks to cut away this, too, would be to make himself unrecognizable.
So he smiles, when he turns to her. He smiles, despite the pain filling the cracks of his heart. He smiles, even when he looks at her and wonders if in another life, another universe, if he might have been the Regent of the Night Court learning to do what he must to save his people.
“I would love that.” And he tucks his shoulder alongside her’s as he turns away from the markets and into the rest of the city. “Until then, perhaps we can get to know each other more. Tell me, Morrighan, what is it you love most about Denocte?"
And that is how they go into the night together, and he hopes (oh, how he hopes) that it will teach them how to dream together.
you have dug your soul out of the grave
do not go back to what buried you
@morrighan
