“Me,” he says, crookedly, because his lips have fallen aslant with a grin not fit for the solemn sounds of this day. And then he steps between their faces, so the skin of his shoulders will meet one’s nose, and the other’s cheek – and then, he takes them.
This time he moves forward.
This time lightning cracks the sky into halves, again and again, and the years are shed away from them like old skin cells.
Because he has been feeling particularly self-loathing today.
He has been winding the clock more than he ought to in the effort to shake her. Her, with her spindly black legs and porcupine mane. Her, with her effortless family, bound together with a stronger glue than his own had been. Maybe it’s that she reminds him of Perse. Maybe it’s that she reminds him of all of the things that choices not his own have made him into, but something brings him back to her.
"Atlantia," he called her.
Atlantia.
So it is no surprise that he was lingering on the edge of the forest searching for distractions with his lips drawn in tight lines like the quiet lines of ECGs. And it is no surprise that he has chosen the nearest two to save him from the burden of everything.
And when they stop the spring that they will land in will be glowing. Here, the sky is lilac like the petals of wild waterleaf, and it melts into a haze of blush where wisps of feather-white clouds strain out all of the colour and pour them like paints into the rippled reflections of a glassy lake that feels more like a mirror.
And he won’t know it, but the girl will never exist in a more beautiful timeline than the one he has forged today. Here, she exists without hurt or betrayal. Here, she exists raised by a family that will never be his – and his crooked grin falls to the dirt even though he doesn’t mean to be bitter.
Because here her bones are poems, and here the marrow in them sounds like melodies, and when she blinks the water from her dark eyelashes they will fall away from her like pearls even though they can’t be. She is grown now, different than the last time, waste deep and drawing ripples in the water that echo out beneath the tips of her glass wings. Behind her, a mountain peak reaches out into the sky and threatens to pull it into everything else – until snow and rock and water and girl are one thing.
And when she sees them with peace in her eyes and a start in her breast, and she says, hastily, “How long have you been watching me?”
Elektrum will forget both of his companions, and think: forever.
elektrum
i am and always will be the optimist
(TLDR; Elektrum takes Sinew and Nish on an adventure to meet a fully grown Atlantia in utopian timeline.)