It is not the stars shattering around them, or Thana’s teeth at his neck, or standing in a dark world that seemed either the beginning of all things or the end of them that Asterion thought of, over and over, as he walked down the echoing halls of the Night Court castle to Moira’s door. It is what the unicorn had said when he asked how long he’d been gone: A year.
A year.
It is too long. Too long to be forgiven, too long to expect her to have hung on in hopeless despair. And yet he has to say he’s sorry - so terribly sorry. And yet he still hopes, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Asterion remembers standing in jungle with sunlight searing golden through the leaves and a hundred birds with jewels for eyes singing and singing, and Moira telling him (her breath warm on his shoulder, his neck) Can’t we stay here together, forever? I’d go where you go.
But he had gone without her, somewhere she could never follow. And Florentine’s dagger had broken at that ravenous crux of magic and time, and they had been stuck with the door between worlds shut between them -
He pauses in the hallway, breathes deeply of the faint tang of the sea and the sweet smell of jasmine flowers. The once-king closes his eyes for a heartbeat or two, and pushes all those clawing feelings down and down. Nothing is the same as it was - the faces he passes in the castle, the banners hung in the city outside. He cannot expect her feelings to have remained, and yet he doesn’t want to brace for her anger. He only wants to see her.
Pulling in a breath, Asterion walks the rest of the way to the Emissary’s quarters. Softly he knocks, saying nothing, his heart a hummingbird in his throat, his stomach a tangle of nerves and guilt. As he waits he glances down, at the basket he’d brought of lilies and sweet rolls, as if such gifts could make up for anything.
Only when the door begins to open does he look up.
she did not want to move or to speak. she wanted to rest, to learn, to dream. she felt very tired
Through the cracks of consciousness she's listened to the world change time and time again. First, when Estelle led her into the wilds, when Estelle was her only star she had to follow, when she left Estelle and found her way...here. Then, Raum had been the first face she'd known. Silver and stunning and completely opaque. He was a fog she could not decipher, a lie she could never find the truth in. Even still, she sees his face in the moon when night comes, smiling like a scythe down on her upturned face. Next had come Caine and Asterion, marching into and out of her life like fireflies flickering on and off in the distance. Sometimes, they were beaming and bright and so near she could taste them. Sometimes, they were as distant as the cosmos that threw only coy glances her way now and again through high, vaulted library windows.
They left.
Bexley left.
Michael and Isra left.
Everyone left until it was just Moira standing in an empty room full of ghosts and mirrors and fog and shadows.
Now, Neerja plucks at the Emissary's tail lazily atop the mass of pillows and blankets, hidden behind the gossamer curtain that lets Moira see the world and keeps her hidden so completely from it save for teasing outlines and sultry peeks when the wind blows through her chamber. The tiger is purring, finally after months and months, telling the Pegasus of the cocoa-maker and bread-baker she has not visited in months. Neerja tells her of the white temple on the mountain that Moira still seeks solace in from time to time.
They are speaking again after ages. So why does the woman still feel so hollow and alone? The circles around her eyes is more than the darkness of her sclera; the fatigue in her body is more than the dulling of her coat and the poking of her hips and ribs. Moira is changed. Moira is devastated.
Eaten time and time again with loss, it is a heavy cross she has not borne well these past months.
She is expecting no guest, no visitors this late at night. Only the brave approach her chambers, and none ever have the courage to knock and disturb her moods. Neerja would frighten them away long before then. Tonight, it seems, would be a rare one when there is a tapping like a mouse demanding entrance. It is soft and it is slow and it is sad.
It sounds like the sorrow of her soul.
With a nod, a strand of light plucked from a candle in the distance spirals from the recesses of her room, curling around the door and pulling it open. The curtain around her billows out, and Moira is an arcane, flaming goddess in a sea of blue and black and gold, sitting atop her cushioned throne with an aching in her eyes that matches the aching in her throat.
Neerja wears a snarl, its match coming from her throat, and leaps from the bed to stand between the two. You, she snarls, but only the Tonnerre girl can hear.
There is no air in Moira's lungs, and the lights blaze and flare, pulled and strung from their candles and scones until they are strung as faerie-lights above the two. "It's late," is all she says, wanting so bad to dismiss him, not expecting the flare in her stomach, the stuttering of her heart or the tears and rage in her eyes. No, she pleads, those tears and that rage has all been burned out. Candles full of fury melted and melted and melted until they were no more. Not even the ash of them should remember that pain.
It is not Moira that opens the door but a flicker of light like a stray beam of sun. He had not expected that, and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust beyond it - and a moment more to find her, half-visible behind a veil that billows in the breeze from the open door. She looks like an oracle, a priestess, a queen, and he is too far away to read the expression in her golden eyes.
Asterion had expected Neerja, expected the snarl now rippling from her throat, and he nods minutely at the tiger but does not quail before her. Instead he steps further into the room, out of the doorway, leaving the night behind. The door closes softly behind him, and they are alone.
He wants to tell them both of another tiger he’d met - the one bonded to Florentine’s mother, a creature of fire and grace who had so reminded him of Moira. He wants to close up the space between them like a stitch gently pulled, each side meeting with a kiss.
But when Moira draws the candle light above them and he sees the hollows of her eyes, the jut of her cheeks, the slight knobs of her spine, Asterion only wants to weep.
In the end all he does is sigh, a long, blown-out breath, and set down the basket of flowers and sweets on the floor next to the wall. He does not come nearer, not with the tiger between them, not when he hasn’t been invited. There is still too much space between them, and her eyes glint too brightly. Oh, it is easy to lay blame on himself for the way she looks - not her expression, but the weariness of the body that wears it. It is easy to heap up hate like kindling, and hope she hands him a match.
It’s late. The bay makes a half-hearted attempt at a smile, and gestures toward the windows. “Tell that to your countrymen.” Out there, it is a festival (it seems to Asterion there is always a festival in Denocte; it is one of its charms). Out there, the bonfires are still burning bright, and songs are being sung, and eyes are meeting across the fire, speaking volumes over the sparks and smoke.
Inside it is quiet, too quiet, except for Neerja, and their breathing.
Asterion lifts his head, and seeks to hold her gaze steady in his own. Still, the veil blows between them. He says, “Is it too late?”
she did not want to move or to speak. she wanted to rest, to learn, to dream. she felt very tired
His entrance is both wanted and unwanted, creating wars in those tumultuous golden eyes, creating rifts in the soul that's already shredded and the heart she's learning to repaint the pieces on. If she paints long enough, she wonders if she can fool the onlookers into thinking it is whole and unbroken, into thinking someday she will be okay.
For someday, she will be okay.
But not today.
Not when Neerja falls into silence, only her tail flicking in agitation, ears tightly back as the Tonnerre girl's should be. They are not, only her eyes widen marginally when Asterion comes closer, when his sigh is the mirror of Michael's only days before. Why do they pop up from the grave, from some unknown place she could not follow, and hope for the best over and over again? Why must they insist on pulling the tapestry of her into nothing but tangled threads upon the floor?
She thinks it is not fair. She thinks it rather cruel and confusing.
Moira bites her lip at his voice, bites her cheek when the memories well up. Dancing. Wine. Forests. A world of their own. Love... Absence. It is a pyre of memories she wishes she could burn, wishes she would have burned when the gypsy pulled her in and offered for her to forget it all, forget Asterion and Caine and Estelle and everything that ever hurt her. Then, the phoenix could not accept such a curse, such a blessing. It truly would have unwoven everything she worked hard to pull together. Sewing her life into some beautiful cloth until her fingers bled and her brow was covered in sweat.
Instead, Moira chose immortality, let it wash the sweat from her brow, let it take her life into the end of eternity. Forever she would watch love die, forever she would feel its pain. The fruit was as bitter as it was sweet, as juicy as it made her thirst for a drink of something else.
"What do you want, Asterion?" And her voice breaks on his name, breaks like the tears that tumble out of dark eyes and fall down her cheeks. These are not waterfalls, not yet, but they are rivers of could-have-beens and almost-weres and what-ifs that she'd long ago tried to lay to rest. "Come, sit," she sighs, moving to the head of the bed so that he might take the foot.
Without her billowing curtain of black, she knows she will be vulnerable, but she is curious why he's back, why he's here, and instead chooses to walk the path of thorns again. There will be no happy ending at the end, she knows this. She needs answers more than she needs peace. Moira Tonnerre has given up on happy endings that she's involved in. Now, all she wants is answers that were not offered before.
Why? she wants to scream at him. Why did you hold me so tenderly and leave without a word? How could you? Was it me? Am I that unlovable? It swirls as Charybdis does, an awful whirlpool within that is without a beginning and without an end, simply pushed into some other dark corner and covered with a painting to pretend she isn't raw, that it was fine when he left.
She doesn’t answer him, leaving his question lingering, hanging in the dim corner of her room. He remembers that it has always been like this with her (except for the last time, declaring themselves where there was no one to hear them but a hundred strange birds with jewels for eyes and the wind sighing through the leaves). Partial answers, or none at all; enough to guess at how she feels but not enough to know.
Or maybe he’s just always been terrible at reading the meaning in her pauses, her glances, her redirections. It doesn’t occur to him, not yet, that Moira has learned the inevitability of an ending, that fighting to hold on only makes the rending cut deeply enough to scar.
What do you want, Asterion?
Oh, a thousand things. But foremost among them he wants for her voice not to have broken at his name like a wave over a jagged rock, not to look at her and see tears glistening on her cheeks and know it is his doing. He wants never to have hurt her.
For the first time he wonders if he should have come here at all. And when Moira tells him to sit, and motions to her bed, Asterion steps nearer but shakes his head. It isn’t that its too intimate, but too strange; the walls, the curtains, the frame of the bed, even the pillows feel too unnatural after his time in that other world. He feels half-feral, like he no longer belongs indoors - he pushes away the thought before wondering where else he doesn’t fit.
When he does answer her, he does so softly, in a voice that hardly rises to the lights drifting above them. He looks out the window, or at the twitching tail of the tiger, or anywhere but Moira’s thin and weary face. “I want to tell you that I’m home, and that I’m so sorry. That I never meant to leave like that. Flora asked me to come with her to meet my father in the world she was born in. The island’s magic was stronger than hers. It shattered the knife that lets her move between worlds. There was no other door. I know that a year is…a terribly long time. It was not a year to me.” Asterion pauses to breathe and feels like he’s underwater, his lungs battling the inhale. He lifts his gaze again to hers. “I want to know if what we said when we parted is still true.”
Nothing is the same as when he left. Isra and Eik are gone to war. Thana and Marisol don’t want to see him. His sister is still in that other world. Cirrus is missing. How can he expect this to be the same? How can he ask for the chance to break her all over again?
“Tell me, Moira,” he says. There is pleading in his eyes - but Asterion doesn’t know if he’s asking let me go or let me stay.
she did not want to move or to speak. she wanted to rest, to learn, to dream. she felt very tired
When the sun sits idly in the sky, when the torches burn through the night, when her eyes are opened and half filled with death already, Moira cannot remember the sound of his voice, but she always remembers the shape of his nose, the curve of his cheek, the indent of his lips as they pressed into her neck and left featherlight kisses over her eyelids. Only when sleep falls heavy on her mind and she's forced into its dark embrace does his voice come back, echoing and echoing and echoing, creating a mural of pasts and futures that will never find their way together. He is not the backbone of her art, but he's found his way into the heart of it all, a sliver of his starlit skin painted into every canvas, tucked into every story that passes dark, dark lips.
Asterion never truly left the burning girl, but then again, he never stayed either.
She looks at him in shades of accusation, relief, and pain. It is a stain upon her skin just as the tears that never ended roll down her cheeks, flooding over and over into the very soul of her until the pieces are ripped again. Ribbons of her heart are shredded further, broken down into threads and fibers, strung out with beads that glisten like shards of glass ready to pierce her heart again. Despite it all, despite the heartache and the loss, regardless of the self-inflicted injuries and longing, after all this time she still cannot bear to see him frown. His lips tug down, his eyes grow troubled, and his voice - that godly voice - sings to her.
Asterion is a siren. A witch sent just for her, enthralling the girl, wrapping her around his finger over and over in a never ending loop. She falls over the cliff, tumbling with her wings tucked tight, back into the sea of him again and again. His lightning-eyes catch her, hold her close, beg her for something - anything - to set him free or bind him forever.
How can she answer his request. How can she ever say something good enough for the explanation he gave. Michael gives so few words to her, yet both men bare their hearts without her ever asking. Shutters fall in her eyes, she looks down as Neerja takes the proffered spot that the once-king of her heart declines. “I would not ask to tear you from your family, I never could hurt you or Flora that way" she manages, unable to meet his eyes, unable to stop the quiver of her voice or the shiver that passes through her. None could stop the Tonnerre girl from answering Estelle's call, or Eluoan's, or even the twins. Family is family even when they reject you.
With a deep breath, she moves forward again, pinning the curtains back as she rests easily against her tigress. It eases the beast only slightly, her rough tongue coming out to gently lick the woman's shoulder. Moira looks into icy blue eyes when she speaks again. “If you think you've ever left my heart you are mistaken. I asked to keep you and you obliged only in words, I would have begged you to stay, or to know what it is you would do... You did not think of me, you did not care for what could happen..." She breaks only minutely, her face buried in Neerja's neck to muffle a sob.
“I waited months and months. I carried on each day with an anchor reaching into the bottom of the sea. I searched and Neerja searched and I could not find you. Asterion I thought you were dead, I thought so many horrid things..." Muffled, she speaks into the tigress' back, seeking comfort in her companion's warmth, pulling strength from another for in these moments she possesses none of her own. “What would you have me say? What answer do you wish to hear?"
Now, in her room, heavy with her scent and colored with her things and guarded by her tiger, there is nothing Asterion can think of but Moira.
But all the way here, through the sleeping forest and past the half-moon lake and onto the cobbled streets with their colorful markets and cloud-billow masts and all the things familiar and strange (bonfires and trees of gemstones, gardens of jasmine and gambling halls) he thought about his father.
About how he never stayed, about how Asterion is sure he carries the same blood, a body made for leaving, and how that scares him. He thought about that last day, standing with the chestnut stallion beneath a tree where every whorl of bark and sliver of leaf was made of stone, in a world that could not sit still. Why, he had asked at last, the question he’d carried with him since he was born, why did you go? Gabriel had smiled a question that would feel familiar on Asterion’s own mouth, something wry and faraway.
I always tried to stay.
Asterion is not his father. But oh, he knows the tide-pull of the road, knows what it is to be driven by duty and in so doing pushing aside all else. He knows what it is to be afraid to love, to believe his love is a cursed thing, doomed to splinter or drown.
He worries it’s happening now. Worse is knowing that it isn’t - that things would be alright, if he had never left Moira alone in that glade.
Their gazes cannot touch; as soon as he turns to her again her eyes of molten gold look away, her dark lashes a veil. His frown deepens when she mentions his sister; he starts to shake his head, and sighs instead. “That isn’t what I meant.” She continues on, speaking to Neerja instead of him, and the bay stallion wants to protest - he did think of her, always, every hour; what he did not think was that his sister’s magic could splinter, that he could be locked out of the world that held the girl he loved.
His eyes are dark and limned with silver as she continues; the saltwater stings. Still she does not turn to him; he wishes he were the tiger, protector and comforter and confidant. Instead he is the reason she needs Neerja. And still his body begs to touch her, to lay his cheek against her shoulder, to brush her hair from her eyes, to kiss her on her closed eyelids and on the tip of her nose and on the soft velvet of her forehead and everywhere.
When she says what answer do you wish to hear?, that is the moment he knows in his heart it is over. But his head is slower, even as his eyes shut for a moment and the room closes like a fist around him his head is looking for reasons to hope. Asterion opens his eyes again and she still has her face pressed against striped fur. The once-king draws a breath, though he already feels like he’s addressing a closed door. Perhaps there is a crack of light beneath.
“I want you to tell me you still choose me. I want you to tell me that you love me, and that there’s some way I can make up to you my year of missing, and show you that you can trust me not to leave again. I want you to tell me to stay, and - and to believe me when I say I will make Denocte my home, that I will be your shadow, your servant.” They feel more like promises than pleading or lies, even when the sea inside him feels dense and dark. Hasn’t a part of him always loved the Night Court, even when it felt like a betrayal to his own? A breeze stirs the curtains of her bed like a hand; Asterion holds her in silent regard, memorizing the curl of her hair, the curve of her neck, the way the lamplight falls across her wings and kisses her body crimson. There is nothing else he wants to say; he is selfish, he only hopes she looks up and says yes.
And he knows it isn’t fair, not when he left her, not when there will always be a part of them both waiting for another goodbye. So he adds, hoarse-voiced, half-desperate, “But more than that I want to know what would make you happy, Moira. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me the truth. And I will do my best to give it to you, whatever it is.”
Silence is a hurricane on a stormy beach, uprooting security and hope like palm trees in the sand. There is already a mess inside her, and now it howls. It howls as a wolf to the moon - hungry, lonely, wild - and does not quiet even when he breaks his silence, breaks the glare of the tiger on him, breaks through her shores made more of chaos than relaxation in his presence. Once, it was different. Still, there are hidden alcoves and are singing, still sunny and bright and simply hoping she'll let them grow, let their cliff faces that hide them tumble away until they can bring their light to the rest of her. And although Moira is a Light Forger, she is so poor when it comes to letting the light into her own heart, her own soul, that it is veiled in shadows, masked in the abyss, the beyond, in something that no amount of prying can ever truly delve into the very depths of.
There are valleys of her unexplored and she does not mind.
She does not mind as Neerja's rough tongue caresses her cheek for only a moment. Then, she turns to Asterion. Turns and feels her heart tear, another ragged edge lost to darkness, another tattered piece falling into his ocean. Gods he undoes her. "If you will not sit, then I shall come to you," her words are as soft as the candlelight around the chamber, as soft as faerie lights dangling above them, orbs appearing as she wills them, as soft as her golden gaze now peppering his skin. The phoenix drinks him down, guzzles in every last detail that she knows so well and the new details that she does not. To his cheeks she assigns the gauntness they now have, to his eyes that pleading, haunted look that she knows she put there. It hurts, it is a dagger in her heart that won't stop twisting, it is a million needles biting into her eyes, it is ice shattering on her skin over and over and over and over. Moira is undone by the differences in him, undone by her lack of trust (again), undone by the fact that she is not who she was, the girl he left went with him.
Who is she now, she wonders, as she climbs from Neerja's warm side, from her only hiding place, from security, and walks to his side with more confidence than she truly feels. She doesn't know what she looks for in those dark eyes when gold finds them, doesn't know quite what she'll find. Resignation and the last lines of hope are there, and just at the bottom she spies silver that he tries to push away - silver like that which so often ran down her own cheeks. Its twin is on his face and it is another punch that pushes all the breath from her body. The power he holds over her is extraordinary, even now.
"Asterion," she sighs on a breath, and it is not a moan of exultation but one of pain and one of longing.
No longer can she look upon that which she loves so dearly, no longer can she see the pain she's caused, the rift, the canyon arching between them. Asterion is in a race to cross its breadth, and she's fearful he won't make it. After all, he wasn't born with wings as she was, and even if he were, would he really be willing to fall. Part of her hopes he is, part of her hopes he wouldn't be, that he values his own life his own heart more than the silly happiness of a girl meant to be painted in shades of blue far often than in shades of passion or joy. There's something about sorrow that brings out the most beautiful things in her and the most wretched things as well. Leaning forward, she runs her nose along his shoulder, takes in his familiar scent, takes in the wildness of the world Flora took them to. "I never wished for a servant, I never knew before that I was always always looking for you even when I did not know your name." Her confession is true and it is from her heart and it is sad. As sad as the looks she's always given him, as sad as their stained glass window finally cracking under a pressure Moira couldn't keep away.
It takes the courage of a lion for her to whisper it again, three little words as ash between them, the barest, most vulnerable, raw "I love you," he draws from her again and again. He pulls water from her well just to drown. "I have always loved you..." and she wants to sob. Wants to beat at his chest as she'd done to her walls, to her pillows, to the trees and the paintings and everything else when she was rabid, when she was Worse, when she was Left. Now, she does not. With all the regality of a Tonnerre, Moira kisses his cheek and pulls from herself one last courageous question, one last request with that catch-me smile she's always thrown at him time and time again. "Walk with me?" She asks at last, inclining that skinny nose of hers towards the door, challenge in her eyes.
It's the final curtain, her final show, and she only hopes she can make it through the night.
He studies her face the way she does his own, finding shadow-mirror images there of the circles below her eyes, the sharp line of her cheekbone, the slope of her shoulders as she climbs from the cushions. Overhead her lights glow, delicate as fireflies but far more constant. A ghost of a smile grows when she speaks, and fades again before she reaches him.
But he can’t keep looking when she sighs his name like that, the way he’s heard it a hundred times in dreams. Before tonight he’s never been in her room, and it had felt almost too intimate a place (has she had another man in here before? The thought darkens his mind like a moon-shadow before passing) - but when he closes his eyes, when she draws near enough to touch him and there is only her scent and her breath and her warmth, they could be anywhere. A festival in Delumine with flowers in their hair, a cliffside in Terrastella like the first day he saw her and his heart already begged her stay, a snowy courtyard or a jungle thick with magic and shadow.
Perhaps there will be more memories, more places made holy by a thing so small as a shared glance. Perhaps -
He keeps his eyes closed as she speaks, but ghosts his muzzle against her cheek. She is real, he is home. I never wished for a servant. He should be used to the mingled feeling of disappointment and relief. It is easy to serve - easier than leading - he could give and give until the ocean of his love was wrung dry and never ask for the tide to turn. How many, instead, have begged or ordered or cursed him to go?
Her tone belies her words; when he finds her gaze again, gold wreathed in black like a flame against the night, he reads the sorrow there. And when she says I love you he can hear the shattering, can feel it reverberate down his bones, where it sinks like stone and roots like roses. “I love you, Moira,” he says, low, fervent, as though he can mend the breaking in her words with the obstinacy of his own. And when she kisses him - his cheek, though he reaches for her lips, hoping - he wants to pull her close, and ask her again to invite him to her bed, and let nothing in with them but starlight.
Because she loves him, she loves him, she loves him (As had Talia - as had Aislinn - as had Marisol - different fires, all burned out).
Her smile feels like a miracle, turns him again into a foolish boy with a belly full of butterflies and the hope to follow them.
“Anywhere,” he breathes, and goes after her out into the hall.
Together they paint a world at sunset and dusk, a world that could have been, that could still be. But oh, how she knows it will not, cannot exist. His is a heart that is swollen and heavy with the past, and hers is one shattered on the bones of reality in the present. Moira has touched him and his fire, felt its wrath curl upon her bones and blacken them, arcing from her muscles and making her very life spasm out of control. She knows what it is to love him and fall and fall and fall. She lets him burn her with his hope. Lets it fester as another sore upon her soul. This will not be the last wound he inflicts, and she knows it is not even Asterion’s fault that he wears that hope so openly, so easily. She knows that this is her doing, these emotions he feels and lets take him so wholly as a current at sea.
Moira will not be caught in the crossfire of the war tonight. She’d tried to talk gently, to invite him nearer and let them crumble together in perfect harmony even as they fractured as a goblet upon the stone.
He refused that soft denial of their tumultuous emotions. So she finds another route instead, looking at Asterion with all the light of a dying star. As Moira moves nearer, her skin brushing against his while she passes, she wonders if he notices the way her faerie lights blink out one by one, one last goodbye, one sad farewell. When he cannot see her face, she feels her lips tremble as she holds in the sob that she knows is rising in her chest. It claws to get out, scratching her throat until it is not a challenge but a war to hold it down. He cannot know her sorrow. He cannot know her pain. Her resolve would weaken if he knew anything of her emotions, and then she would tumble back into his life again and let them both be torn asunder.
No.
No.
No…
The phoenix does not look back at him for seconds that could be hours. Thundering heart beats fiercely, painfully, cruelly within her chest as she gathers herself, rallies for their last moments as...this...whatever this is. Twisting in her gut is ignored just as butterflies those first few times were ignored. Everything that the once-king of Terrastella and still-king of her heart (how Michael would weep to hear another man’s name written so deeply within her) ignites within the phoenix is another reason for her to walk away.
As a daughter of the House Tonnerre, she knows she should not be so good at running, but instead harness the art of cunning and intrigue and deception to use as she wishes, yet she cannot bring herself to lie to the both of them. He is her weakness and ancestors forgive her, but she is weak for him. Putty. Splattered as paint upon the floor.
Slowly, warmth brushes her sides again and Moira almost breaks. The shiver that passes over her skin is not from the cold alone, not even close. Golden eyes pass to the angles of Asterion’s cheeks. She knows them so well, has painted them a million times, carved them into canvas and hide until they are immortalized in her little chamber so she might never forget. And how could she ever forget Asterion? When he is beside her she smiles again, it is softer, quieter. Perhaps that is a hint, the only she’d give away, at what is to come, what she would do.
Their steps are slow, steady, and Moira tells him of the first time she saw him. He was (still is, oh he still is) so handsome and mesmerizing and entirely unreal on the Prastaglia Cliffs when he’d found her. Then, she’d been both more and less of a dreamer.
Moira tells him of her dreams of them. How she’d wished he hadn’t left. How she’d thought of him so often and how she thought it would have been better to throw herself from the cliffs and let the sea take her wherever he is because it had to be better than being wherever he wasn’t. Her voice is soft when she tells him that she loved him so fiercely and dearly and closely that she lost herself and did not know where she was sometimes or who she should be when he was not there. Asterion made her soft. He made her more human than she’d ever been at the Estate. There, when they pause, her lips are soft against his collarbone when she thanks him.
The duo is somewhere near the kitchens, she’s taken them through the passages that she could walk blindly without even Neerja to guide her. The tigress has stayed behind, unwilling to watch as Moira rips her heart out and sends it afloat down a river that may not have an end, or it may end up in the very bottom of the sea that once held Michael and drowned him and rose him and held him as she wishes so desperately to do on too many occasions that it scares her to think of them all. When Asterion pulls her nearer, presses closer with that sweet smile of his, it is easy to forget the gold of the other man. It would be so easy to forget the world if it meant she could live forever in those sad brown eyes.
That’s exactly why she pulls them through the kitchen doors and grabs a cinnamon roll from the counters. The cook has long since stopped putting all of the sweets away, knowing Moira would, every once in a great while between her terrible fits of sorrow and sulking, eventually, find her way to the counters and swipe something from them to devour.
She pulls apart the folds of the roll, smearing the frosting on Asterion’s lips with a laugh that sounds like honey and starlight. There is still innocence even in the worst of times, it is a shining star in the heart of a flaming girl.
Satisfied that the cream cheese frosting upon his nose and lips is there well enough, she offers him at last part of her precious dessert. When he takes it from her, looking at the destruction that Moira’s left, she takes that moment to reach forward and kiss the frosting from his cheek, from his nose. Only his lips are left untouched, unsullied by the girl before she says goodbye. If there is silver in the gold of her eyes, she cannot hide it well enough. So, she does the only thing she can think of and eats the rest of the roll so that he could not retaliate so quickly without fetching another from the counter.
By that time she’s set a cutting pace over the floor, swinging through another door that would lead toward the front of the Keep. Bursting through it as a conflagration would the forests, Moira does not wait for him this time, she cannot when her breathing is shallow and she is ready to topple over and beg forgiveness. How dare she? Who does she think she is flirting so carelessly when she knows what is to come?
A monster.
Heartless.
She must be more Tonnerre than she originally thought to allow herself to follow through with such despicable actions.
Disgusted, disgruntled, Moira is huffing by the time she gets to the antechamber and strides through it. Behind her, Asterion’s narrowing the gap and at last is beside her when she’s found her way into the hallway leading to the foyer. He’s caught up and he’s so close and he smells so divine and feels like heaven and she can’t help the tear that falls now, not when she’s told him everything - the terrible moments, the hopes, the thoughts of a family that could have been and would never be.
Before him, she is bare. He knows of everything except Michael. Plunging into a scalding pool would be less painful than this, looking him in the eye and seeing the complete devastation written in every line of his face.
Moira… Oh Moira Tonnerre lets herself open the doors then, pushes them without any help and with only her own awful thoughts. As she turns, it is slow and she knows what she will find - her first love, maybe her last love, broken before her. And still she looks. Forcing those golden eyes up, the phoenix does not dishonor him by looking away and daring to break his heart in any way that is less than personal. She licks her lips and clears her throat, and when she pulls him near one last time it is not hard to tell that she is crying. It is as she pulls away that Moira dashes away the tears and smiles so angelically she could be sent from Tempus himself to bless Asterion. But this is no blessing being bestowed.
"Asterion,” she whispers at last. Hoarse from all those screams she tries desperately to hold back at least for now. "I know what we want to hear, what I would and should say any other time, and we both know that I cannot go back to being who I was before I was broken…” Moira takes another step back, another step away. "To see you hurting is pain like I’ve never known… But I think you should go. I...I can’t have you stay and walk away.”
Now there’s a crack in her shell, now her voice breaks. "Please go and let us meet as just...friends...when we do meet again.”
picked for my beauty and left to die
@'Asterion' one final sad closer. thank you for this beautiful romance ;o; |❂ | ❂
10-25-2020, 09:49 PM - This post was last modified: 10-25-2020, 10:04 PM by Moira
