[private] dawn is coming, open your eyes, phae

[dear]

careful, child, light the fuse and get away—

She wonders what it might be like to touch him. (Would she come away kissed with stardust? Could she touch the planets that orbit around him and know what it’s like to be caught in his orbit, too? Would she ever be the same again if she did?) But she does not, because he is a cosmic thing and she is bound to the earth. Because he has not invited her to and she has always been so much like those deer, smiling but shy.

He laughs and the sound of it echoes in each chamber of her heart. It vibrates through the marrow of her bones and her expression softens around something lax, something without pretense. She is wholly in the moment, lost to the sound of it. And she leans into the story of his mother, the magician who’d crafted him in Tephra, before… 

(Before. She remembers, though she had watched the changes from the forest, safe amongst the deer there. She had watched and been untouched by it, certain her parents and each of her siblings were safe, too.) 

She cannot stop herself now. He is smiling something faint when she finally reaches out to graze his shoulder. There is some strange tremor at the heart of her to think of him with his mother, smiling, insisting that he loved her more. She smiles, too, a thing that’s barely there at all as she draws away to meet his gaze. 

“I’m certain you’ll find it someday, Daedalus,” she says and she means it fiercely. Because he is a spectacular thing, a thing made of magic and wonder, because the sound of his laughter reverberates in the bones long after he’s gone quiet.

This time, she does not argue. She just tilts her delicate head and says, “so are you.” 

— cause happiness throws a shower of sparks

@daedalus