The moon rose and the sun set. Then night drifted into day.
Over and over again the stars rose, blinking through the trees with curious eyes. They watched and waited but still he did not wake. Lysander did not rise like the moon. Slowly the flower girl had come to wonder if it was the day he chose best and so she exchanged night for day and waited for him there too. But still he did not wake.
Florentine thought of many things as she waited. She thought of sand and bones, a world of black glass and monsters writhing in the dark and how love could birth such violence. It was violence that had changed Lysander in so many ways. He was hot where he should be cool, his remaining antler was a jagged, broken branch that had bled a river down the soft, white pine of the floor. Flora’s eyes should have run over skin pulled taught across bone, but now they lingered over flesh swollen and bruised.
Lysander’s consciousness creeps upon him to the song of her racing heart and the rhythmic drip of his medicine into its wooden bowl. He stirs as gently as the insect that ripples the surface of a glass lake. Slow, slow, slow, his consciousness flows across from his limbs to his face.
Oh what it is to see him move, to see his lips twitch! Too long they had been devoid of the smile Florentine knows so well. When had he ever been in her presence and not smiled? That was all they were: Florentine and Lysander, smiles and laughter, whimsy and stories. He liked her stories and so she told him many while he lay asleep. She told tales until her real adventures ran out and then she made them up from her dreams and lands that may only exist within her mind.
But he had not healed, and neither had he stirred – until now. His gasp, the raspy cry of a pain so freshly found, was a surprise. Florentine stirs from her place within the shadows. How long had she been there? How many times had the moon risen to find her still stood there? She does not know, and she does not care, for now Lysander wakes under the light of the sun, and that is enough.
Shaking limbs draw her from her place in the dark, where she hides her gold, her flowers, her grief. Flora steps into the light that pours through the window and her regret is art across her face. It is shadow-full lines and lips that bear no smile. When had she ever not smiled in his presence?
She does not want to, but she looks to the broken boy that lies below her with his ugly wound and fractured bones. Was this the cost of following her? A petal falls like testament to the tears she has long ago stopped shedding. Florentine is as dry as the sand she first met him in. This girl is rough bone exposed by coarse, windswept sand.
“Lysander-“ That honeyed voice starts and cannot finish, for she sees what he begins to feel. It is there, a glimmer in the dark of his eye and the shiver that crawls up her spine.
Fear.
So Florentine paints upon her lips a smile so fake and bright. She becomes everything she is not but the smile’s colours are wrong. They are water-washed with the tears of her sadness. “It took you long enough. I have been waiting.” Scolding words, betrayed by their whispered delivery.
She thought she might have been waiting forever.
@Lysander
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
