T
he flowers are soft against his cheek, when he dips his head against them. And even when he can hear their petals whispering against his skin, he cannot help but feel as though it is wrong —— it is wrong, for something sharp to reach for something soft.
— it is wrong, to stand amongst them like he is their savior, not the thing come to pull them up by their roots.
— it is wrong, to be the contradiction that he is.
Ipomoea turns to watch Maeve bound through the flowers and he wonders if he was ever that innocent. He wonders if he could have been, had he been born here instead of Solterra; had he a mother who had loved him, instead of one who left him in the sands. When he tries to remember, when he tries to think back on his childhood he can remember only the feeling that he was always searching for something that he could not find, something stolen from him before he had a chance to learn even its name.
Now, as he watches Maeve, he understands. And he hopes she will never have that innocence stolen from her the way it was from him.
So he forces himself to smile as he follows after her, and let the tulips bump against his legs like old friends as he weaves through them.
“Ah, a good choice,” he says when he comes up beside her. “They say purple is the color of royalty — it’s a noble color, perfect for young ladies like yourself.” Ipomoea has never understood how a color could be reserved for specific people; to him a flower was a flower, and deserved to be shared.
He turns his head to regard the flowers nearest them. “Yesterday I liked blue — or a purple so deep it was nearly blue. The day before it was red, like the sun sometimes is in the mornings. But today—” he steps deeper into the fields, as if searching. Until at last he stops with a smile on his face, and leans down towards a tulip that has yet to open.
“—today I like this one."
And as he leans over it its petals at last begin to unfurl, revealing a tulip colored soft and pink at its center, that lightened into paler and paler shades of gold at the edges of it.
an endless garden
