Luster had not known that Nerine had ever been home to Djinni (or Stillwater, for that matter), but it is easy enough to deduce it from the way she says back. You can’t go back to a place you’ve never been, after all. She thinks often of returning to Sylva, to the sunset trees and the lake with the stars trapped inside its glimmering surface. To the cave with damp, earthy walls and the musk of a man she could have loved. Does love, in some fragile, broken way. But she knows things would never be the same as they were, not like before when she trusted him so blindly with her heart.
It would be so different now.
She knows better.
(She doesn’t, never learns.)
“Why did you leave?” She asks quietly when Djinni has finished describing her home for Merry who seems absolutely taken by the idea of it. She smiles, touches her lips to that spot between his ears and stays, breathing in the scent of his skin for the way it soothes the wounds that appear, caught in the sharp edges of a heart broken and wedged back together. It seems so odd that she, they, would leave it, but hadn’t she left also? First to Ischia (and she winces, feels suddenly jagged inside), and then to Taiga when the echo of her loneliness in that cave was too loud to bear.
But as it always is, that same question is returned to her and she bristles against it, a frown tugging at her brow. There is not a single piece of her that wants to open up to Djinni - to anyone - not a single piece of her that understands this wretched ache in her chest or the way her bones have grown sharper beneath her skin. Except Djinni is looking down at Merry now, not Luster, and it is an out so easy she takes it without thinking. “He is my brother,” she offers by way of explanation, soft and reserved because it is true she has always wanted to be a mother, feel the weight of life growing in her belly, “mine though, whether he likes it or not.” She grins in a tired way, tired but true, flips his forelock over his eyes in one deft motion. “I love him more than anything.”
Then she’s whuffling against his forehead, blowing aside those dark, silk hairs again. Finding his eyes so blue and soft blinking up at her from beneath even darker lashes. “Mmaybe if we ask her really nicely, Djinni will take us on an adventure to see her rock piles. You look like just the sort of fellow made for being king of the mountain.” She glances up at the rose woman with a softness in her expression that hadn’t been there a moment ago, a fondness that’s snuck quietly into the dark of those earthy brown eyes. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
@[Djinni]