I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
Aegean still cannot help but look at Pteron and see the sun staring back at him. There is something so permanent about the man before him—Aegean cannot imagine a time before him and certainly cannot imagine a time after him. He is as forever as anything that he has ever known and it never occurs to him that something as small as mortality could ever touch him. The world simply could not continue to spin without Pteron being there. There was no way for the world to continue—the gravity would never work.
Still, such dark thoughts do not color Aegean’s mind and he gladly lets himself sink into the moment. The warmth of it, the sheer joy that radiates from him, sinks into his very bones. “You will look so handsome with your wrinkles,” he thinks, knowing full well that such things will never touch them. He has been protected from death when it came calling for him at birth and he certainly will not let it catch him now. “And I will love counting each and every one—for you will be all the more precious to me for it.”
Laughing under his breath at the thought, he touches Pteron’s cheek again and then closes his eyes on a sigh. It never seemed to matter how much sleep he got these days. The exhaustion was always around the corner, slipping underneath the surface and pulling him back into the lull of sleep. He hums lightly as the lights continue to dance around them, arching and then diving below the forest floor. “I love you too,” he whispers and wonders that he never grows tired of saying it—never tires of letting Pteron know.
“Almost as much as I will love this child of ours.”
It feels like a miracle, although a miracle that he never thinks question (it is not strange to bring a child into the world by magic when it had been his birth right himself). “What do you think they will be like?”
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)