[P] where the wild things go;

[Aster]

And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
—

Aster thinks that she was not made to be a mother. She was not made to soothe and calm and murmur comfort. If it were anyone other than her brother (her brother and herself) she might only watch, or laugh, or leave.

But she doesn’t feel like laughing now. When he presses his lips to her shoulder, she tucks her nose beneath his chin; they stand together, dark and pale, like he is her shadow, or she is a bone-carved cast of him. It still smells like flowers; there is a purple flower lying in the grass, shed from their mother’s hair. When Leo’s cub tumbles backward, hers pounces onto it, silent and bright-eyed and quick.

“Yes,” she tells him, and Aster is certain. “Yes,” she answers again, and her voice is still steady, and her golden eyes are tracing the edge of the clearing where the sunlight falls away into the dark shadow of the trees. No longer is the air crackling, molecules furious as time itself is torn open like fabric with a seam ripper. It is silent. It is only them.

When he pulls in a breath, she does too. It is easy to imagine they always used to breathe together, in their unborn dreaming. Her twin steps away to pet the little cubs and she lets him, watching the way his winds around his feet, watching the way hers stretches, lifts its chin, makes a little face so fierce it should be comical on such a young and kittenish face. Aster does not laugh.

Her gaze flicks to him when he speaks again, voicing his wonderings. For the first she has nothing, no answers to give; she wants to remind him that she is the same as he, abandoned, the world new enough it should be frightening. But that last question -

Aster holds his gaze and says, “No.” And it is the only thing she knows to be absolutely true in this stop-time world.

And then she shakes herself like she has walked out of the water, or risen from a dream. “They will be back,” she reiterates, and something loosens in her voice; when she lifts her head she scents the air like a doe might with its fawn beside it. There is only a small, small voice inside her that says but I am the child. “We’ll wait here.” Until? - she does not say. She cannot. Time is a concept she does not yet have; the sun has not crawled so much as an inch. The island is silent. Even the shadows are still.

Once again she looks at the cheetah cubs, tumbling in the grass. “I wonder if they need to eat,” she muses. It is impossible to know, when now they are living and breathing and warm, and minutes ago they were cool smooth wood. She wonders the same for themselves. “Maybe we’ll have to hunt for them.”

♢

[Leonidas]

In this fell clutch of circumstance

When his cub tumbles backward and Aster’s pounces upon it, she reaches to bite at her twin’s ear. Leonidas watches the cubs play, how simple the world is to those so newly created. They have flesh where once there was only wood. They use their flesh and bone as if they have always been made of thus. It is simple to watch the cubs - this small gift they have been given in exchange for the loss of their family.


He touches Aster, for she is everything that grounds him now. She is the familiar in a world that has now begun to turn so strange. Her brow rests beneath his chin and he holds her, he clings to her for else he might slip and lose her too. He might watch her forever to ensure she never leaves his sight. He might trail her until they both are just bones within a bowl of dust. He might, he might, he might… but these are the vows of a little boy and vows of little boys are either lost to time or grow with them. This is a vow woven into a scar and scars never fade.


He will follow her, always.


Yes, his sister says. Then yes again. Each one is a hurt, but only his eyes grow dim with its feeling. He accepts the wounds of her revelation with all the submission of a criminal beneath a whip of justice. He nods, as if he understands what she means - but how is a boy to know what trials life will throw at them when he and his sister are without a family? But all things are possible to a child and so he nods and thinks they will survive this.


She suggests they stay, to wait for their parents to return - when? The questions that dog Leonidas’ mind dog his sister’s also. How long will it take them? How long until their parents rip through the portal and return as if they have never left? How long until he and his twin can sleep entwined beside their parents once again?


He draws a breath and steps toward the place where his parents disappeared, where the pieces of Florentine’s dagger lay broken in the grass. He steps up to and then beyond where the portal opened. He steps through and back and through and back and feels… nothing. There is no whisper that magic even existed here… The boy sighs and returns to his sibling, his lips press against her cheek. “One of us should stay and one of us hunt,” He murmurs. “You stay,” he whispers. Leonidas turns and his cub pauses, looks to her twin and then stumbles after him through the long shrub. “What is your cub called?” Leonidas asks as Aster’s cub hesitates, torn between its twin and its familiar. “I can take it too.”


As if knowing, Leonidas cub bounces back to its sibling, nuzzles along its side and moves to push it after him. When Aster gives the name of the cub, he moves on into the distance and hopes that cubs know better that he about how to hunt.




@Aster

credits

[Aster]

And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
—

Aster watches her brother pace through the place where a doorway stood and back again. And then again. Her bone-china face is unperturbed but her eyes are sharp, expectant. When nothing happens, when there is no movement but his noon shadow crowding beneath him and the wind moving through the grass, she blows out a long breath.

When he returns to her she is looking away, out beyond the river where the sun shines as on glass, beyond the waterfall that is still frozen, stopped by time like a bubble in amber. It is silent except for a faraway muttering, sighing, constant voice that Aster does not know is the sea; it sounds to her a little like breathing.

This doesn’t frighten her. She doesn’t know of monsters yet, either.

As Leonidas’s lips find her cheek, she nibbles absent-mindedly at his throat. Aster falls still when he speaks, and she doesn’t know whether to laugh or scoff or demand to go with him when he tells her to stay. In the end she decides to agree, and pulls away.

The little cub looks at her, as if it has understood his question (perhaps it has; what does a thing whose blood was sap and skin bark know?). Aster stares back, and each of them think what golden eyes you have.

“Teak,” she says, because that is the oldest word she can find in his head. Neither of them know it is the wood he was fashioned from, but her father might have smiled. The cat opens his mouth in a silent miao,, his tongue curling like a question mark. “Go on,” she says, as Teak bats at his sister, and when Aster looks up at Leonidas it isn’t clear whether she was speaking to one or all of them.

She smiles, and she does not say beware.

♢

[Leonidas]

In this fell clutch of circumstance

Leonidas is not brave.


The more he steps into the woods, the more the trees gather behind him. They crowd between the boy and his twin until the ivory of Aster’s skin is no longer a light amidst the green. 


He had looked back, not once nor twice but every third stride as if he knew that the fourth would take her out of sight. Each time she is further, each time she is watching where he entered the wood. When he turns to look for the fifth time Aster is gone. There are only leaves and branches where she once had been.


Leonidas was not the only one to look for his sister. Teak has also been looking back. Even as he plays with his sister, as they tumble through the grasses and bound ahead and then race back to him, still the cub pauses now and again and looks back to where Aster waits. Nova leaps upon him and the cubs roll in the dirt together. Teak pushes his sister off, rolls and stands smelling the air. Leonidas watches him until the cub seems content that she is still near. The cat turns to chase his sister again and Leo lets out a breath and steps on into the wood, they would go until Teak could no longer smell Aster and then they would turn back.




@Aster

credits