04-09-2023, 09:33 PM
Is he holding his breath?
He exhales long and slow and shackles his focus more firmly to the flowers.
(Perhaps the weight of his gaze is unnerving. He guesses it in the way she doesn’t look back at him, studying the earth underfoot instead. The way she addresses the flowers when she says her name.)
This is the one gift he can give her: to bend the light to better illuminate the flowers she studies, so that she might see them more clearly, so that they might shine more brightly. (And perhaps the light falls soft on the gleaming surface of her, too. Perhaps he is a selfish thing, too, Hadrien.)
Israfel.
He files it away. He’ll keep it someplace safe. He’ll remember.
He’ll remember, though there are so many things that he's forgotten.
“Israfel,” he echoes, faint, like a secret. He chances a glance at her face when she asks him his name in turn. He smiles, just barely. “My name is Hadrien.”
The light burns a little brighter and he thinks he can see the flowers turning their faces to it. “I’m sorry,” he says again, quieter still, “I’ve just never seen anything like you before.”
He dissects the light then, lets it soften and then go out completely. (Still, the sun shines on and maybe it hadn’t even been possible to tell that he’d manipulated that beam at all.) He glances at her sidelong, acutely aware now of the intensity of his gaze.
He exhales long and slow and shackles his focus more firmly to the flowers.
(Perhaps the weight of his gaze is unnerving. He guesses it in the way she doesn’t look back at him, studying the earth underfoot instead. The way she addresses the flowers when she says her name.)
This is the one gift he can give her: to bend the light to better illuminate the flowers she studies, so that she might see them more clearly, so that they might shine more brightly. (And perhaps the light falls soft on the gleaming surface of her, too. Perhaps he is a selfish thing, too, Hadrien.)
Israfel.
He files it away. He’ll keep it someplace safe. He’ll remember.
He’ll remember, though there are so many things that he's forgotten.
“Israfel,” he echoes, faint, like a secret. He chances a glance at her face when she asks him his name in turn. He smiles, just barely. “My name is Hadrien.”
The light burns a little brighter and he thinks he can see the flowers turning their faces to it. “I’m sorry,” he says again, quieter still, “I’ve just never seen anything like you before.”
He dissects the light then, lets it soften and then go out completely. (Still, the sun shines on and maybe it hadn’t even been possible to tell that he’d manipulated that beam at all.) He glances at her sidelong, acutely aware now of the intensity of his gaze.
— hadrien
@Israfel