[private] I think I made you up inside my head; pteron

[Pteron]

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

Pteron had imagined this sight a hundred times in the past. Aegean, here in Taiga, the soft glow of him illuminating the fog that clings to his sides. He looks half-mist himself, and beautiful enough to make Pteron’s throat catch. Aegean, here in Taiga, reminding him that he had not dreamt those nights in Hyaline. Pteron had worried, a time or two, that he might have made it up - perhaps the high mountain air had made him dizzy, made the dreams seem real. But this is Aegean, and there is that soft whorl of hair just above his left eye, a place that Pteron has so tenderly kissed. He’d not imagined that.

“You can’t be here,” Pteron whispers in reply. He’d come nearer without realizing it, near enough to see that crooked whorl, near enough that his hushed voice easily crosses the space between them. Near enough to touch, though he pulls himself back a moment before his lips brush against Aegean’s shoulder. He shakes his head as though that will return the sense to it, as though that might disrupt the near-magnetic force that draws him closer to the amethyst-eyed boy.

“You can’t be here,” he repeats, with his blue ears twisting about, dark nostrils flaring to catch a scent. He should look for the danger too, but he cannot bring himself to take his eyes from Aegean. “It’s not safe. My wife lives here now; you can’t stay.” The pegasus is only half-aware that his words will make little sense to Aegean. He is most concerned with being discovered by Reia, and can’t know that she is miles away, occupied by the antics of the child whose existence is living proof of the danger they are both in. Were she to discover Aegean here – Aegean, whom Pteron cannot keep his eyes off – she will have no qualm about destroying him.

Pteron is not allowed ties to others, ties that might threaten Reia’s possession of him. Aegean is nothing but a scent to her now, and Pteron’s acquiescence has spared Aegean and Aquaria thus far. But were she to discover him here, were she to suspect even a fraction of the affection that Pteron has for the antlered boy? The forest would surely burn along with them.

His words - his actions - are those of a man whose affair has been discovered, who intends to sacrifice it for the continuance of his marriage. Only the tone of those words, the way his voice breaks as he lets himself brush just one wayward lock away from Aegean’s face, suggests that it might be anything different. “We can’t see each other anymore.”

-- pteron --

@[aegean]