even after they have been stepped on
There is a moment — stuttering, fleeting, short-lived — in which the flowers hang in the air between him and he feels his heart beat two steps faster.
He supposes there was always something about offering a gift, particularly one as personal as this (to him, all flowers were personal; particularly the ones he had chosen for himself) that involved a bit of fear. He had always found it childish, as if being afraid of a gift being rejected were more embarrassing than it actually being rejected — and yet it’s a knee-jerk reaction, a trickle of ice down his spine that he had no say in being there. And all he can do is smile his sad, shy smile, and pretend the world will be okay either way (it will be — he reminds himself of the earth’s permanence, of the resilience of the flowers he wanted so much to be like.)
And of course, there was something else entirely about a gift being received, particularly with such a smile and excitement as her’s.
He finds it contagious, her smile.
It makes his own feel a little less sad, a little less forced, a little more like it used to. Like a flower blooming — no, a flower wilted, petals dropping one by one, a bit of yellow creeping up its leaves. And then that first bit of water offered to its dry roots, that first hand of salvation. He thinks that might be him, the wilting flower looking for a bit of care. Funny, he thinks, when he’s so used to being the gardener, the one doing the caring. And yet there was something in her eyes and in her voice that had him relaxing into the new role all the same.
“We have that in common.” He finds himself leaning towards her comfortably, gravitating around her smile like a planet does the sun. “Are there any in particular you still need?” Something in his eyes is saying he will help her look, or that perhaps he already knows. And he decides then that he likes the way she talks about the flowers, because it is so similar to the way he talks about them himself — and oh, oh it feels good to be understood that way. She reminds him of another girl from Terrastella, one with flower petals following her with every step she took and laughter in every word she spoke.
Rhoeas is coming closer still, dragging the tines of his antlers through the grasses. Ipomoea smiles, quick as her laughter. “I suppose I’m just lucky,” his voice is full of the laughter he does not let go, not yet, not when her joke is more of a pun than she realizes. Rhoeas laughs for him, and the sound of it is grating and halting in his mind.
“I’ll be sure to do just that,” he promises, “and I’ll be sure to bring Delumine’s finest with me when I arrive.” It feels like a lifetime since he has visited the southern court and, in a way, it has been — years at least, long enough for him to have blossomed a dozen times over, and to watch all of his petals drop just as many times. All of his friends in Terrastella were dead or gone now, but maybe —
maybe there was always time for making new friends.
There is silence for only a moment, both of them smiling, both of them looking after the other with a spark that says I know you. You’re like me, aren’t you? a familiarity he does not find so easily in strangers. And then —
“Oh,” he says with surprise. But it is not a bad sort of surprise, rather the opposite. “Oh,” he repeats, and this time — oh, this time there is understanding, and joy filling all the spaces between his heartbeats, between his words, between his lungs.
“I would like that,” his voice is as soft as the flowers she tucks away with the others. “I think you would make a very good friend too, Elena.” And oh, if he was a flower, surely he would be one that had not quite bloomed late, but just in time.
@
"Speaking."
