A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
The words, soft as they are, are like a slap across his cheek. They are like someone taking him by the shoulders and shaking him, because they are so familiar.
A life on a quiet inlet, safe and lonesome (though at the time he regretted the former and did not know it as the latter), fed by stories and starshine. But for Asterion’s twin, they might have been the same. A thousand questions crowd his mouth, a thousand more stir in the dim quiet places of his heart, his mind, and if the bay were still the boy he had been he might have asked them all.
Instead, he considers Ossian, still damp. How uncertain he must be, how weary. He is in no condition to be pressed for a past that has literally come crashing to an end, and so Asterion only nods, somber. “I do see.”
He is not so much a seeker of touch – not like either of his sisters, who were free in seeking and sharing comfort – but at that soft second sigh he steps nearer, pressing his shoulder to the boy’s. Still he wonders if he should have, until Ossian speaks again.
“I don’t want to, either,” he answers softly, and turns his eyes out to the crevice in the rock, where the last of the sunlight is fading on the sea. A trail of fire burnt down to darkness. “But it took me a very long time to figure that out.” He thinks, then, of his years of wandering; of the searching that left him unsatisfied, because he had no idea what it was he was looking for.
He still isn’t sure if he’s found it. But if feels closer, and maybe that is enough.
Asterion blows out a breath that stirs the dark hair of his forelock as he looks back to the colt, and a smile turns up the corners of his mouth. “But neither of us are alone now, Ossian.”
@Ossian always worth the wait <3
