Work Text:
“You have to replant any flowers that you pick”, he had said when you founded your kingdom in the corner of the world. And so the boy spends hours in the fields with handfuls of seeds, and you spend your days with his daisy chains woven between locks of hair, draped around shoulders and curled around wrists.
If it wasn’t for your then blood-stained hands, you’d think you were a forest deity.
The sentimental time traveller, who holds onto every gift and lives to tell others’ stories, has somehow managed to turn the man born in fire into a god of growth. He’s crowned you his king, and in return you gingerly cradle lilies of the valley between palms that have known nothing but destruction, careful not to scorch the whites and greens.
He’s pressed paradise into your palms, and you will eternally hold it close to your chest, protect it with your life. But you, too, drink from waterfalls and dance in their mist. You, too, hike to the highest point you can find and let the wind dry your tears. You cherish, you take.
If they have forgiven you, can you not forgive yourself?
An empire in the woods, where friends huddle under mushrooms and sleep in mossy bundles. Where even you warrior demons can learn to sprout violets from your shoulders, to twist yellow lilies around your horns, and grow hyacinths from your palms.
(you cry when bits of red flake and fall beneath green and petal.)
But in this land there’s a secret neon among the earthy tones, woven in by ungodly hands, eons before anyone knew of this secret haven. And he bears the weight of it all, the weight of the world, Atlas and his library, Atlas and his mind.
And when the time traveller cries petal tears, you have hands with which to wipe them away. When he fails to leave the library, when he fails to see the sky, you have arms to carry marigolds and sunflowers into his empty eyes. He’s given you freedom, and you bloom in thanks. Calla lilies and gladiolus grow from your intertwined fingers. The library smells disgustingly sweet, and you wouldn’t change a thing.
And suddenly gardenias, and asters and delphinium and tulips, crimson roses. They crawl from your throat, and you choke, and you bloom red. In the land of flowers, in eden, in escape: you burn.
Thin hands worn from adventure, cut from endless pages of frantic writing, are holding hyacinths when you see them again. And his wrists are blue, and his veins glow like neon indigo under his skin.
My time is short.
He weeps until sweet pea blooms in his tear ducts, and no matter how you try they will not stop. They bloom and bloom and bloom with bitter purples and vibrant goodbyes. Your hands are not enough.
When Atlas falls to save the very earth that cursed him, he leaves nothing behind.
Family and friends drunk on the smell of roses, basking in the sun, do not shed a tear. You wish to become them, because it’s so much easier, but you cannot let yourself for fear of forgetting.
The red takes on a different shade, and the bouquet of peonies you picked for him is nothing but but black ash in fiery palms.