my heart is so full of flowers
There are memories dancing in the air, echoing off the stone steps and dusty walls.
He can hear laughter, and footsteps, and the scolding of a castle maid after two children racing each other up, and up, and up. He can hear the dry flutter of wings snapping open, of wind coursing down immature feathers. He can hear the way it makes their footsteps lighter, like sunlight instead of shadow.
When he blinks it is as if he is living that memory, if only for a second. The dust rises up in the shape of it before him, swirling around like two pegasi daring each other to fly.
But when he blinks again there are only the dust motes chasing each other around and around, caught in a ray of sunlight.
He does not know that it is the boy’s memory (he looks too wild to belong here, too wild to have once been a prince of anything.) He thinks he should recognize him, with his sunbright wings and his antlers of gold, with his eyes so full of life like another pegasus he knows. “Do you mind if I join you?” already he is stepping along after him, tucking his own wings close to his ankles.
The climb is always better with company he thinks, as they follow the spiraling staircase up (and up and up and up, as if it might never end—)
But it does end.
And together they spill out like two ghosts of the earth (of the forest) onto the terrace at the top. Ipomoea’s eyes feel like hungry things as they look out across the fields of flowers, like they are searching for something he is not sure they will find. He thinks there ought to be a pattern to the flowers; that if he looks close enough he might find it.
He flicks an ear to the wildling boy. For a moment only the wind answers him, and Ipomoea, too, imagines he can hear its urging.
“How do you imagine we live?” his voice is quiet, like he is still a ghost of a memory. He can see what he means, when he turns to him and sees the recklessness shining in his golden eyes. “Most do not think it a prison, but safety. They long for the community. A shared life with those they love.”
He does not tell him that he feels it, too; the cold, unyielding stone, the too-perfect flowers that did not choose the pattern to grow in. He does not tell him that he looks for the pieces of wild growing in the rows, the in-between things that others think of as mistakes but he sees as beauty.
Ipomoea does not tell him that the boy with his wild look reminds him of someone else. “What is your name?” he asks, and again —
he thinks he is more familiar than he ought to be.
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