[private] oh, these wings, they flicker; desire

[aureus]

Aureus

oh, these wings, they flicker and my feathers stir
'til I'm an ancient soul in a cascade world

Aureus has no protection against the real world—let alone someone like Desire.

His heart is on his sleeve. Bright and bleeding and so vulnerable. Perhaps that is why he hides away so much. Why he did not seek out the girl made of glass after the first time they had crossed paths, even though something in him had nearly splintered apart when he had first known her. He could not bear seeing her again—could not bear where their paths would lead. The inevitable heartache she would bring.

Or that he would bring her.

He had such pain promised in his palms.

But she’s there now and his chest aches immediately, dull and throbbing when he studies her from beneath the swath of his pale forelock. “Hourglass,” he is saying her name before he can stop himself, taking a step forward and then stopping, pulling up short. There’s so much that he wants to say—that he could say—but he does not have the boldness of his fathers. Their openness. Their unending love.

He has just his fear and his cowardice.

“I have been avoiding everything,” he admits, because he finds that he can’t keep the truth from her. He can’t look her in the eye and lie. He was avoiding her, he knows, but it wasn’t just her—and he knows that he can no more lie than let her walk away thinking that it was because of some fault within her.

“I don’t know how to not avoid things any more.”

Another truth, this time said more quietly.

and I'm quick with the bullet when it comes undone
I got a head like a turret with a mouth for a gun