some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
There is a peace, Leo thinks, to drowning in this woman’s quiet happiness. It submerges him and he goes. He sinks with relieved delight. Being beside her, the glow of her wings, so much like buttermilk, is like forgetting his pain and yet remembering it, feeling it eased with her quiet delight.
Though she wonders of the pain that draws itself in shadows across his cheeks and lips, she does not ask. He would be grateful if he knew. He had fled too many times - he is a boy too wild, too flight to face even his own sorrows that hunt him like predators. They fall from the lips of girls who look at him and find him wanting. Even the girl whose blood is his, whose body mirrors his own, who he lay tangled with in the muted still of their shared womb.
The boy blinks and tips his chin up to the sky to see what Solstice sees. She hopes to leave him and ah, his familiar ache returns like a bruise. Leonidas blinks slowly and sighs softly. But his ears fall to his head, “It should not be tame.” The wildling grouses, imagining a flower forced to grow and conform. He has never conformed, he lives in his wild places and will not be tamed by the wants of the courts and their busy city places.
But then she is gone. Her parting is like the setting sun and his body is colder, darker without her beside him. The boy stays for a time and then turns too, disappearing into the dark solitude of his woods, his home.
@Solstice
