I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
Hyaline has never felt like his home—but Aegean does not fault it for this. There has never been a true place that has felt like his home. He has grown up with a vagabond heart and a poet’s dream for roots and no matter how much he may come to care for a particular bend of land, it will never clutch at him.
Not truly.
Still, standing here with the lake lapping at his legs and the fog curling toward him and the feel of the stallion near him, he imagines it is home. He can breathe in the cool, clean water and imagine that he will always feel this way. That he will come to put down roots and flourish here. Maybe he will.
It is a romantic notion and he does nothing to dispel it. Instead he just lets it simmer on the back of his tongue, turning his smile soft and dreamy and quiet. He tips his antlered head back and watches Pteron with the same quiet intensity that he does all things, feeling it blossom like an uncrushed flower.
“Maybe I am not talking about the lake at all,” he says with an unguarded smile, his white teeth flashing against the impossible white of his lips, the milky light of him casting a glow atop the water that comes.
He has no pretense. He has no flirtatious games.
He simply has himself and his heart and he offers it up so willingly.
“How could I possibly look elsewhere when you are standing before me?”
There is no embarrassment or shame that tinges his cheeks and he doesn’t attempt to break his eye contact. He just holds onto it as he feels the tension like a physical thing, as he feels the way that it snakes throughout him and plants into him. The rest of the world melts away and it is just the two of them.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)