[P] In this old town, we're tumbling down

[Florentine]

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Time is her god and it slows to a trickle as she stands watching her brother. Asterion is a silhouette, framed by the golden light pouring in through clear glass windows. He is more celestial now than any star she has ever seen illuminate the night’s sky.
 
Her eyes drink in the stars that give his black body shape and the glimmer of his largest star, half hidden behind the sweep of his forelock.
 
When he moves to her, Florentine sees how his sharp angles are gone – no longer do bones protrude as they shouldn’t. His skin is vitality once more, a life force lit by the stars that litter his dark torso. But his eyes, they are as distant as moons and they do not gleam as they once did. Nothing about his gaze brings a smile to her lips, but it does bring an ache to her heart, her stomach.
 
That look tells of the weight of the crown, and the horrendousness of gods. Was Florentine supposed to have been the one to lead Terrastella through this all? Her eyes were already vacant then, what more damage could it have done? Even as she thinks such thoughts, her soul shatters like glass and her heart twists tighter, tighter and sputters in her chest. She could never have lead their people as well as he.
 
He comes to her, a kiss upon her cheek and into it she leans, laying her own upon his in turn. The words that fall from his lips are a weight, they sprout like vines from the earth and cast his sister low. Yet she smiles as he does, united in their sorrow.
 
“I think the crown was the biggest trouble I could ever bring you.” Those words are all whispers and apologies. Florentine drinks him in anew (because she cannot stop looking at him, not now). That invisible crown he wears, it does not weigh him down, he stands tall beneath it. And now his sister’s heart it soaring, it has loosed its tethers and slipped its weight. He is an imprint in her mind, her soul, her heart.
 
“I am so proud of you.” Florentine whispers, pressed close, but still far enough that she can study the curve of his jaw, the softness of his eyes, the handsome lines of his face (lest she ever forget them). She only stops admiring her brother when tears film her amethyst gaze and then she laughs and takes a breath. Petals scatter like her tears, her golden mane tumbling forward as she looks to the floor and then back up, an earnest whisper upon her lips, “So proud.”
 
The gilded girl stands before her brother, not just as a queen before her successor, a friend before another, a younger sister before her elder brother and a subject before her sovereign. She is all of those things and as every one of them she is proud of him. Oh this love aches and it is so big and nothing like the love she has for Lysander. It is blood and family and bonds that tie into the fabric of her being.
 
“To think I could have gone a life without you…” The words trail off, swallowed by the regal chamber and its golden light. Florentine has so many lives to live and in each one is a hole for him to fill. “Have I ever told you how much I love you?” Her delicate head tilts and she watches him and knows, for the first time, that she could live without their father, as long as she has her brother.


@Asterion - my heart.

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world