I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
The entire moment is suspended—caught between breaths—and Aegean feels a gentle ache in his chest because of it. It lingers, and he lets it. He holds onto it in his lungs and memorizes the way that his heart feels like it is beating too fast and too slow all at once, as though the laws of gravity have somehow changed around them both. He closes his eyes for a moment and just breathes, focusing on the inhale and the exhale and the sweet taste of wine that is Pteron—the way he can smell him so distinctly here.
When he opens, he feels like Pteron is closer, but he doesn’t reach out.
Even though there is a gentle curiosity scratching at the back of his mind—a prodding, a want. The desire to trace patterns into the swirls of blue and cream and ivory. To know the velvet of him. To know. But Aegean lives in the ache instead and lets it become part of him. He watches him, listening raptly, and when the other boy admits his desire, his laugh is low and soft like smoke, breathy and warm.
“Wild things are not meant to be caught,” he whispers quietly, studying the angles and dips and curves of the other. “I dream of so many things, but never of you being caught.” He could hardly imagine a world where his Pteron (he feels that now, a tug of it in a dreamer’s heart) was anything but free.
The snowflakes still dazzle around them, spinning and throwing their light over the pair, and Aegean angles his head, purple eyes unreadable as he considers the question—the demand. Tell me what you want, the boy says, and he wonders if he could ever find the words to describe it. The way that his heart races for things that he can never see and yet dreams up all the same—the beautiful illusions of it.
“I want beautiful moments,” he admits, a slight frown crossing his face in concentration before he looks up, holding onto the other’s gaze and letting the tension continue. “I want the impossible.”
A brief smile, gossamer thin as it plays at the corners of his mouth.
“Maybe that means I want you.”
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)