I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
This world does not make sense to Aegean.
It is only the bits and pieces that he is able to comprehend, to piece together into a whole that is clear. He does not understand the words—the warning of it, the way that Pteron seeks to drive him away—but he does understand the way that he comes closer. He knows the gravity of it because it pulls at his belly too, it drags him further along, although he too resists that primal urge to close the gap with his lips to the boy’s jaw, the strength that has long since been planted and grown along the pegasus’ maturing body.
“I am here though,” he finally says, his voice still detached, foggy with confusion but each word so carefully said, the syllables handled with care. Then, a moment, where the uncertainty settles into the curves and the angles of his handsome face, shadowing the impossible white of him. “Wife?” he says, angling his head so that he may stare at Pteron, study the whole of him, try to understand the moment.
Around him, fog begins to grow dense. Perhaps to mirror the fog that creeps through the whorls of his heart. Perhaps in response to the idea that his safety may be compromised. Either way, the illusion of it crawls slowly toward the pair, darkening until it is nearly shadows. It wounds around his legs and then spreads like vines across his back, dimming the glow of him but not snuffing it out entirely.
“I am not afraid for my safety,” he whispers, although he does not tell the other everything that he is afraid of. The things that break a poet’s heart—the ending, the loss, the stretch of the inevitable. Aegean would hold onto the glow of the moon forever, let himself be burned by the surface of the sun for the beauty of it, but he feels that he has no such choice now. The choice has been made and he is meant to live in the afterglow of it, forever shackled to the world of darkness with the sun ripped from his grasp.
The silence between them stretches but Aegean doesn’t look away, doesn’t move toward or away.
He leans into the touch as Pteron brushes the hair away.
“I will go,” he whispers. “If that’s what you want.”
He wouldn’t dream of forcing himself where he is not wanted, of giving into the hunger of his own heart for the beauty of the sun if that hunger was not requited. His selfishness knew boundaries.
“But I do not need to be here to see you,” a sad whisper of a smile.
“I will always see you, Pteron of Taiga.”
In his dreams, both asleep and waking.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)