[P] we're not meant for history;

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* Asterion can answer for her nothing of their father. Never had he laid his eyes on the copper of his skin, never had he heard the bedrock of his voice. The only things he has are fragments from his mother and stories from Florentine, and it is not enough to piece together a man. It would not even be enough to piece together a ghost. All the bay can do is believe that he was good. He must have been, to be so loved. But that is an ache far from the one he feels now, with her forehead pressed against his neck, his lips ghosting over the flowers tangled in her hair. He cannot say how grateful he is that she came to him, how much he needed the contact too; he can only drape his neck over hers, only settle himself by matching his slow breathing to her own. (Somewhere deep in his mind, in his memory, he wonders if he finds this comforting because he was similarly tangled up with Talia in the deep darkness of their mother, heart to heart, a matching rhythm.) I don’t know what to do, she says, and his eyes go to the window, to the scene she had been so recently watching. The morning sunlight slants in on them, soft and white, and the trees look a little greener than they had the day before. Like spring was a promise they were ready to keep. He feels at once moored and adrift, a kite on a long tether. There are things he knows – how to read tides, which clouds mean rain, what variety of coarse sea-grass tastes the least like salt and fish – but those things seem inadequate here. Laughably so. But he thinks of the paint that marks him still in Vespera’s colors, thinks of the way Aislinn had looked at him last night, as though he were worth looking at at all. Of Florentine’s heartbeat against his, and the sound of her laugh, as golden as the rest of her. And then he thinks of what he’d heard, what had brought him to her chambers, of the dried and fading flower on the sill, somehow familiar. He knows only pieces: A friend of hers beaten, found bloody and near-death, and Isorath gone, and Reichenbach – Reichebach the cause. His mind can’t fit it all together, and so he doesn’t try. “Well,” he begins, and huffs a breath into her forelock, stirring the golden hairs. There is too long of a pause before he continues; he does not know what to do, either. He never has. “What, exactly, needs doing?”   He cannot bring himself to ask what happened. It goes against all he is to push, to pry, to make anyone do anything. But he does move enough so that his gaze finds the amethyst of hers, their heads level, and he thinks of saltwater: the way it could mean tears or tides or hurricanes, but healing, too. “Are you ok?” It is the closest he will come to asking what went wrong.  @Florentine