you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
She has embraced the quiet of her Hyaline, though it has taken years to adjust herself to the fact that the bustle she perceived in her childhood here was only an illusion of youth. If there were children here other than her own they too might see Hyaline in just the same way, their perspective narrowed down to the small busy lives they lead before bedtime. There have been times she has considered that if it were in her power she would sweep all of the east together into a single land of black shores, snowy peaks, and red canyonlands, redrawing and erasing the borders. In this daydream though, many more things than boundary lines are different...except for one.
Behind Kensa, through round green leaves and thin white trunks the lake below glitters and glares under the sun, she stands in the midst of her tiny paradise doing nothing at all. She gazes around perhaps, noticing how the years have altered this place. There is a worn path around the entire meadow where six children have left the track of hundred races. Scorch marks on the sheer rock wall at the back of the meadow are Brunhilde’s work, one of them having left the perfect outline of a butterfly. The stream has been walked and splashed in for years and there is a little pool near the wall that Valek created by digging and rolling until he could lie there with water running over his back during the hottest days of summer. Risk and Kelynen’s ever widening shared nest where they curl together even as the grow taller and taller. This meadow is all the lines on the back of the door marking out memories of her precious family.
Yet when he arrives to press his muzzle into the blond fall of her hair and breathe her in she finds she can let the years and the children retreat to the back of her mind. I’ve missed you. He says, and it makes her smile until she realizes she does not hear a smile in the words. Kensa curls into Litotes and draws her lips along the masculine ridge of his neck. He has not brought her lions, or shadows, and from this vantage there are no snowflakes in silver. Though she remains freckled in gold and splashed with white she forgets that too. The beautiful woman is pushed aside by the empathetic, innocent girl who recognizes the melancholy boy in her arms in a way she has not in years.
It is strange to see Litotes again in the way she is seeing him now, to recognize her lover with a raw clarity. It is a flicker but still it makes her chest ache with nostalgia and her shoulders heavy with the burden of loving someone so deeply. “I like it here.” She says wistfully, drawing back to rest her cheek against his. “But I like it a lot more now.” He’d said that to her once, her sad boy, and then he’d kissed her that very first time. She hadn’t loved him that day, but she should have. She should have loved him from the moment she’d seen his face so that now she might not have this feeling of overflowing, of love too spent too thriftily. “Tell me what’s in your head, darling. Tell me anything at all.”
Kensa
@[litotes]
