[mature] i've never fallen from quite this high; Aquaria

[Pteron]

finger trips across my cheek----------------
----------------kiss me until i can't speak

Aquaria doesn’t pull away. The nervous jackhammer of his pulse does not slow, but it feels softer somehow – less desperate, less fearful. Instead, she leans back against him, her scales cool in the warm air, and a sigh of relief passes unencumbered between his lips. He looks up when she speaks, and her earnest smile summons a matching one of his own. He wants to reach out and kiss it, to trace the smooth line of her cheek, but he is unwilling to upset this delicate balance that they might finally have restored. He watches her instead, so enthralled that for a moment he does not even notice the water that arches over them. Only when his gaze slips over her shoulder does the glittering catch his eye.

Pteron’s ears flick forward sharply at her mention of a promise, and even when it turns out to not be the promise from the woods, his delight is nearly equal. The soft kiss on his nose keeps the memory of that other promise alive, though it is quickly buried in the back of his mind at the sight of her reckless smile. Now that is his Aquaria, as unpredictable and as warm as the sea.

“Everything I have,” he repeats, glancing up again at the seawater that encloses them. It feels secret, private, and the shimmer of sunlight through the water highlights the curves in a most distracting way. It feels crude, cruel even, to look at her that way though, and so he returns his olive gaze to her violet eyes. His breath catches again, but he takes another breath of the captured air. It tastes like the sea and the sun and himself and Aquaria, and he wonders how long it will be until he succumbs, until he does something that will ruin them irreparably.

“Show me,” he says, and allows himself one, just one, touch of his mouth to the curve of her neck as he turns to stand beside her. His water-logged wings are a barrier between them when he stands like this, Pteron finds, and this way they can face her world together…whatever that might mean. Magic, he is sure, the kind that she spins as easily as breathing. He does not understand how, but he had meant what he had said about trust, and waits without fear for whatever comes next.

@[Aquaria]

-- pteron --