AND I KNOW THAT ROME WASN'T BURNT IN A DAY
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
H
e has never known how to be soft. His softest is with Pilate, aching across the room, in physical pain because he cannot be more than a boy with a thunderhead for a heart, always rolling and booming and too far away to be truly felt-- or his softest is with her father, men made of magic and anger and something else nameless and shapeless tucked away in the dark.--But he would not know how to be her, either, or to be her sister, or mother, or beast. For all his boiling magic, for all his seething rage, Andras is too obsessed with order and quiet to be anything truly wild. If he were a dog, unleashed, he would leave a string of ruin, claws and teeth and blood, in his wake, but he would always come back to the porch, and the door, and wait in the cold for his sense to come back to him.
He wishes. Oh, god, he wishes-- but it is not possible, not really. So he is trapped, where Danaë looks at him like she knows who he is, and the someone that did--Ipomoea--is becoming the thing that is wild on both of their place. Two halves of two different wholes. Something els altogether.
I will, she whispers, not so much to him. He stands sternly before her, turning his empty glass in his grip, tilting it so the rim matches the rims of his glasses, barely bouncing light in the dark and the silence.
Andras looks at her and wonders if that's true. He looks at her and wonders if she knows she does not have to be soft and bright and beautiful to be good. He wonders if he thinks this because he has to, because there is no other option, for her, or for him.
"I'm a friend," he says, to answer her question. This is said mirthlessly, without an expected skew toward warmth. It is not said unkindly, which speaks more than anything else. "Specifically, your Emissary."
Though she is not looking, really, he does not speak further, or move more than to turn the glass again and again.
He is almost too quiet, when he asks, "How are you?"
ANDRAS, EMISSARY OF DELUMINE
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
