When did he begin seeking out the monsters in other people like he was trying to justify the existence of his own?
Ipomoea can see it haunting her; can see the way it lays teeth around her heart and makes her shudder. He can feel it like it is his own heart being gnawed away at (and perhaps it is; perhaps Ipomoea has at last become everyone’s monster, carving away bits of himself so that he might fit more demons inside of him.) He wants to reach for her —
it should be wrong, to reach for a monster with love instead of hate. It should be wrong, to forgive the wrongs for the sake of the soul. It should make him feel wrong, wrong, wrong to look past the sin in her that he might have condemned in another.
But Ipomoea is alive in his contradictions now. Soft and sharp, peace and war, life and death. She says she is well in her body and he might have laughed for the understanding of it, if his heart was not breaking in sorrow. He might have told her I am, too if he was not always still looking east and wondering when the call of the sands would at last prove too much for him.
“Have you forgotten what you are yet?” his voice is no more than a whisper of the leaves overhead, shaking in the wind. And he hopes — desperately, fervently — that she has not. He can still see the way she danced beneath the glow of Denocte’s arches, can still hear her voice whispering to him above the bonfire drums — I dance to forget what I am.
Ipomoea knows it will not help.
He knows it the way he knows she is still becoming, even if she misses the meaning of it. He can see her struggling the way the first spring flowers sometimes struggle, as if they will never survive the first frost. But they do (always, they do), and he has always thought they bloomed all the brighter for it.
He thinks (he hopes) the same will ring true for her. Ipomoea has seen enough death and destruction in the world to look at a struggling flower and wish only for it to persevere.
So he lifts his head, and steps closer despite the way she had shied away, despite the way Rhoeas presses an antler of warning into his side. “I wanted to ask something of you. Dawn Court is in need of Champions, and I—“ can feel time running out “—can think of no one better to lead the scholars, than you.” Ipomoea knows it is always those whose hearts feel wrapped in darkness who find ways to let the light shine brighter. Perhaps it is precisely because Sereia thinks herself a monster that he believes in her more. Perhaps it is why he sees her not as what she is, but who she could be; who they all could be.
It is perhaps the optimist in him, that boy who wanted nothing more than to grow a garden (only now his garden is not of flowers, but of people.)
“I know it is a lot to ask. But still I hope you will consider it.” The wind whispers between them, and even now he can feel the cold bite to it, even here in summer. He can feel it calling to the monster in his own heart.
When he tilts his head to look into the darkness between the trees where Rhoeas steps, he thinks he can see fate curling its lips into a smile. And perhaps it is then that he knows what is coming for him, for them all.
He hopes they will forgive him.
~
"Speaking."
@
