She is beaming at the easy way he returns her flirtations, suddenly all warmth and sunshine even despite the reaching dark that laps at the edge of the light emanating from her. She laughs and the sound is like morning, dawning bright and beautiful in the smile on her mouth that grows again when he moves to pull her in against him. It feels no less like home, cradled against bone instead of flesh, but she cannot help but to want more of him to touch, more to feel. She wants the curve of his neck and to see the lean muscle flicker beneath the gentle tickle of her lips. She wants to bury her face in the stormy strands of his hair until she is drunk with the way he smells like summer and starry nights. She wants to be shielded beneath wings full of the softest feather she’s ever known in her entire life.
She wants him to be himself instead of these bones he would never willingly choose.
She would give anything, just as she had before for a different cause, for a continent of strangers, to give him back everything that had been stolen.
Which is why it is so hard to fathom the strands of twilight that weave around his bones, so hard to understand why and how especially when he says her name and asks her how she did that. She blinks at him from behind the ridges of her bone mask, two eyes as teal as the tropical waters that rest on nearby shores. “I don’t - I didn’t,” and she feels confused but not accused, can’t help but to be mesmerized by the intensity of his beauty, “I just really missed touching you.” She says finally, and the smiles that had been erased by her awe now slip shyly back into place as she reaches up to kiss him. “A lot. Everywhere.”
And then once more she is crushed against him,and he is firm and corporeal, wholly tangible in a way that makes her heart skitter wildly inside her chest. His lips are against her jaw and over her throat, in her hair and along neck until she is leaned into him with her eyes closed and soft sounds of breathless want upon her lips. He stops because he is sensible, but she is not and when her eyes open again to find him it is to ask, “Are you sure? I can probably wait a little while longer.” Which is of course an untruth even as she buries herself against him with another trembling groan. But she can’t stop touching him, can’t stop leaving these trails of wanting kisses over the curve of his shoulder and along the tines of where her antlers have solidified in the space of his chest.
“I love you.” She tells him again, whispers it into the twilight of his skin in case he has managed to forget in the last sixty seconds. “You are everything I never deserved and exactly who I would have dreamed of if I was ever brave enough to do so.” She’s whispering now, eyes closed against the vulnerabilities that swell there, swimming like sea stars in the swirling teal. And when his lips find the soft place behind her ear, she surrenders to the urging of her body and lets her legs crumple beneath her.
It is not long before there are three of them in this quiet place, and she is grateful for how smoothly the birth goes. She isn’t sure either one of them could have handled more pain and more loss from this world frozen in time, frozen in fear. But in the pale golden light that shines from her lantern skin, there is a small boy with a coat the same color as his fathers and with soft rosettes the same shade as a cold winter sky. She kisses every spot she can reach, curling around him in the dark so that no chill can find his damp skin. She cleans his ears and his face, traces the curve of delicate wings full of soft, delicate feathers that make her smile in a soft way and look up at Nightlock with every ounce of pride.
“He looks like you.” She says, and her voice is still softer than starlight when she reaches out to touch her nose to Nightlocks. But this boy is like her too, with the spots that sometimes sprawl across her skin and the opal sheen of the small hooves tucked beneath him. There are even impossibly tiny buds in the down of his mane that promise all the places flowers will one day bloom. The way he is so completely both of them makes something start to ache inside her chest when she finds Nightlock's watching gaze again.“Will you name him?” A gentle question from gentle lips that reach out to motion Nightlock down beside them where he can see his boy and she can map out the constellations of his twilight face in kisses she traces over the curve of his jaw.
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love