LYSANDER
Lysander would be sorry to know how many of her stories he’d missed. Perhaps they’d slipped into his subconscious anyway, pieces of her drifting in his dreams.
A dark ear twitches as he hears her stir; he might have expected that she’d be there, waiting for him to rise, but he is touched nonetheless. He will always welcome his name on her lips, regardless of the tone. When he looks to her there is little resemblance to the ebullient girl he had first met.
“Ah, Flora,” he says softly, pleased (and just a little surprised) to find his voice works at all. When he swallows he, too, thinks of the desert, of sand and bones and burning heat. It feels like he has swallowed the sun. It has gone dark inside of him, but lives searing somewhere just below his lungs - they would find it, if they carved him open.
It is still agony to move and so he doesn’t; he allows his eye to flutter back closed, lashes light as butterfly wings on the dark golden plane of his cheek. He can hear her bending nearer, the sound of her breathing; when he inhales it smells like spring with her flowers so close, though he remembers the cold bite of the snow. The way his blood looked, red and black on blue and white.
Another shallow breath, the sound of her whisper still echoing in his ears; he does not like that at all. Not coming from her, and not directed at him. Neither of them were made for sorrow or for fear, and so he tries to push it away, this feeling of running out, of ending. He is master enough of his emotions that his mind settles, though his heart is still beating too fast, too loud, a laboring clock winding down. It knows more than he does.
He can feel her eyes on him — a thing he has always enjoyed, until now. “Don’t look at me like that,” he chides her, and opens his own again, his gaze finding hers, focusing, holding. Slowly he pushes himself up, enough that his head is lifted from cool sheets. It feels strangely lopsided, and he remembers the snap of an antler, the sound like a limb (or a bone) breaking. Oh, how tatty she must find him now; he wants to laugh. His injured eye throbs, his head aches exquisitely, but that is not the source of the agony. Lysander blows out a breath, arches an eyebrow at that false smile Florentine wears, runs his mind down through the rest of his body. Neck and shoulders and legs and back, all sore but fine. Sinew and muscle, bruised but livable, easily survived. Somebody has stitched him up, in places, and done a good job of it.
So there must be something else. Something his body is keeping a secret from him, with pain the only clue.
“I am sorry,” he begins, and then pauses as he considers all the ways he might finish the statement. He could easily make a joke of it: that he had not thought this place would be far less safe than the one they had left, that he did not think her boyfriend liked him very much, that he hopes she understands a little more of what he’d meant, all that time ago and worlds away, when he spoke of love. “That we did not get to dance,” he finishes instead, truthfully, and his smile feels a little more familiar.
It was not, after all, the first dance he’d seen that had ended in blood. It was only the first time that it had been his.
His gaze drops down to the subtle knife she stills wears, scabbard raised in silver patterns of flowers. He does not yet think to ask if she remembers how to wield it.
But it stirs a memory in him, something more than hooves and teeth. A quick flash in the darkness, a sliver of moonlight come down. He thought it enough that he’d been outnumbered four to one, but to use such a lethal weapon—
“Do you think they meant to kill me?” Lysander sounds almost surprised about it; now is the first chance it’s had to occur to him. The intent may not have been for him to survive, bruised and battered but - in their eyes- having been proven a point. “It doesn’t seem like very wise diplomacy.” To laugh feels good, even when it hurts, even when it becomes a cough.
Even when it leaves flecks of scarlet on the white of the sheet.
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