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Leon remembers being born from the blossom of stone. His fingernails came first, painstakingly carved and chiseled and whittled with the striking tools that Jillian wielded with precision. Love can sometimes be an act of violence - that's how his hands came to be. This is what he learnt.
Sharlene chose his face. She had artists go around with her from village to village. When he was still just a hunk of marble, Leon watched her spend so many sleepless nights picking and choosing his features from the sketches of faces that blended together in whirls of charcoal, scratching her head when she couldn't work out how to fit one feature together with the other. The spill of her blue hair was like silk thread over her shoulders and onto the draft paper. The candles glowed softly around her as she worked late into the night.
Pygmalion watched over them, drinking his tea. Galatea sat placidly in a corner, still a sculpture of stone.
Months later, Leon is strolling along the shore, a sister on each arm. His toes dip through the damp sand, hair entangled by the salty sea air, clothes moist against his body, pressed close to his skin to his pores by the wind. He murmurs the beauty of the world to Sharlene and she whispers back,
"I knew you were there, inside that rock. I had so much fun to share with you. This is what I brought you life to see."
Jillian adjusts her grasp so Leon is pulled in a little closer. His elbow against her ribs, so he can feel the thumping pulse of her heart. His other arm's palm finds Sharlene's wrist, echoing two heartbeats, reassurance of existence. Like screaming a name into a paper cup telephone, the string vibrating a message to the other end. Like simultaneously drawing breath, preparing to run.
The Mediterranean, vast and deep, sparkles and shifts along with the circling of the moon. Leon makes his feet obey him, following the pace his sisters set. If he is Oberon they are Titania. Jillian's skin is like the pale of abalone overset with hues of wild rose, a garden full of the enchanting scent, when she tells him,
"i want to see the whole world with you, far beyond Greece, where you were made. I want to show you that - that we can be more than where we were born."
Leon stands on the shore with a sister on each arm, exchanging dreams, turning their fantasies over in his minds, savouring the weight of their promises like sugar on his tongue. Like coins in his pocket. Like the heavy heft of his name, which their master gave him. He is a legacy. He is a legacy of skill and art, and a legend born from familial ties and hope, and at heart a little desperate for freedom.
And the salt of the sea promises adventure.
Stone is worn away by sea. Leon learns this when the storms overturn their ship in a frenzy of froth and foam.
The deck is slippery. Blue and green and the flashing purple lightning above the billowing thunder, the roar of waves like roads that have no endings. The ship is a frenzy of knotted ropes and pulling of sails as the men dash back and forth on the deck.
The storm came in fast. Jillian didn't even have time to react, her mouth opening in a startled O, when the waves washed over the ship and pulled her tools away from her like a child tugging a mother's distractions from her hands.
Jillian's focus is her eyes translucent in illuminated awe as the sky claps its hands and she is buried by the moment of the sea claiming her. Leon sees the tide swallow his sculptor, his sister, from her place at the deck and the break of his scream comes along with his frenzied feet attempting to dash for her. The slap of aching soles against deck. He is barefoot, and he slips, and as he falls he sees her look back, a little lost, at him. The wave washes overboard leaving nothing behind, the tidal of crepuscular turquoise dragging her with it.
His howl, his roar, is the unshakable rock. But even rock can shift, continents quaking. And the continents move seas, stirring up tsunamis of their grief.
Sharlene is in the cabin, not on the deck. She is safe for now, huddled inside with the rest of the younger passengers. Inside, safely, she peers through a tiny round window that resembles a fisheye and sketches the storm with delight, not knowing what it has taken from her. Her legs, pressed together at the knees and calves tucked under her thighs to make room for the children gathered around her. Her chalk, her pastels, moving delicately across the page to capture the spray of the waves at the base of the ship. Her wrist, flicking lively. Jillian used to tell her not to hunch her back when she drew, but she does so now.
Sharlene, in that damp and musty room, captures beauty from a safe distance.
Leon comes into the room afterwards, bedraggled and alone, and her smile dims like a lamp turning off. He feels the weight of the absence besides him and crumples to the floor.
Odd, his arms are wearing away. Instead of the apricot Sharlene and Jillian carefully chose together, painting swabs all over their own skin to compare shades, there's a dull grey the colour of the stone he was born from.
Stone is worn away by sea and tears.
Poseidon will not let his prize go. Jillian adjusts to this strange world beneath Amphitrite's command, strange because it obeys no rules of hers, wandering the mazes of coral branches and pearls buried halfway in the ground as if they were pebbles. Dressed in the pale blue of a handmaiden, paler than even the tresses of lake blue she pins up around her head in defiance to the fashions of the underwater which have trailing strands buoyed by the liquid they live within, she builds statues of grotesque features in an expression of a refusal to submit her will to the man with hair the violet colour of the boundary between the midnight zone and the rest of the ocean.
Poseidon's trident is as golden as his glinting eyes, amused especially when his gaze reaches and catches the beautiful terror and abject despair in Jillian's sculptures. In them is nothing of the love she felt when carving Leon - every strike of the chisel, a furious blow that the courtiers shun. Sometimes she wonders if this man really is Poseidon. She'd heard tell that Poseidon's preferred form was hair as white-blonde as fine sand, eyes as deep a blue as the midsummer sky - echoing regalia, echoing elegance, echoing upbringing. Yet this man's face is adorned by the shrewdness of a rat, and he more often chooses to don the shark armour or orca skin that Poseidon's portraits lack.
Jillian refuses company and arms herself with the thorny wit she'd employed so rarely in Leon's presence. The acerbic lengths she could have used would have melted his stone heart clean away. Love was disarmament, and now she employs every artillery in her possession, every ammunition she is granted or that she can snatch when they are unwary. Jillian stays in her room, keeps to herself, walks only the lonely spaces with no other souls.
Sharlene visits Psyche. The butterfly wings of the goddess, enrapturing radiance, the colours like that of a prism smashed upon concrete - they can do nothing for her. Psyche's soft eyes - blue - why are they always blue? land upon her with compassion, but there is nothing she can do for this child. She shakes her head, lilac hair airily swaying over shoulders creamy with the light of youth. She turns her back, chiton with slitted skirt moving steadily further. Sharlene's wails reverberate through the air of Eros's citadel for three long days before her tears of dismay start to flood the halls and she is ushered into their rooms, given the choice to proceed on a futile quest.
She comes back empty handed after having emptied a satchel of honey cakes, having found that the underworld is empty, and the whims of the pantheon do not extend to offending one of their own for the sake of a mere artist, especially one whose first wish was already granted.
This is how Sharlene learns that the gods lose interest in your story's sequel - she crosses the river of the dead to find her sister, thinking the water claimed Jillian's breath, and has nothing to show for it but the blisters on her arms from the touch of the dead and a basket of asphodel that wilts in Leon's presence as if his life must stubbornly persist even after their hearts have been broken.
The source of pain - an inconvenience to someone who could do far more to ease the pain, but out of cruelty chooses not to. For Sharlene, a bitter pill to swallow.
Her eyes are now a gold darkened by the faint taint if what she's seen, and her smile is one that bears the cool of sadness. Sharlene goes and she does not come back the same as before, emptied out like a bowl once full of bread and now only left with crumbs, but Leon too has busied himself with the aim of finding a sister.
Seek out a hero - seek out a son. Seek out one of Poseidon's brood, and exchange blood for blood.
Leon journeys miles by himself to the isles beyond Greece, where Poseidon's child has fled to escape the wrath of another, legitimate, son who bears no deity's blood. This, what they once wished for, but in such a heartbreaking form given to him. He travels on vessels - ships rocking and carts rolling and wagons driven, and cannot bear the sight of sustenance when the dream driving him forward has eclipsed into one single vision, several blurry wishes coalescing into one. 'What's the point of traveling anywhere without you?' He steels himself with the cards that he plays - a game of minor consequence that had become entertainment among powerful men as of late, and works his way through the courts of the world with grit and careful plays. He leans on the thought of arm through arm to forge his resolve. He eats rarely and relies on the sustenance of pain throbbing underneath of his skin during fights, the adrenaline of being so closely pushed to the edge, to keep him awake.
He finds the child shaking, holding back tears, in the holding cell of a gladiator arena. His sister slaughtered beside him, lying peacefully dead with a club fallen beside her.
Leon's shadow falls over the boy like a axe.
Leon has not stained his hands with anything of consequence before, but he finds it remarkably easy to let his desperation fasten the clinking shackles around the boy's wrists and drag him away from his sister's fallen body. Almost as if they are not even his own hands. For the first time since his creation, he feels mechanical as his feet move, stilted, pulling the rage of a son forward bound and helpless. He struggles, of course he struggles, and Leon quiets his own heart's tortured wail to bark words of anger instead.
Jillian is not dead. This boy's sister is. Leon's resolve simmers, wavers, twists. Jillian is not dead yet. Jillian is not dead yet, but she might as well be, locked in a place that once meant dreams to her. What is a worse torture than a nightmare built from a hope? The betrayal of the beauty you sought so fiercely, the hands you tried to hold turning on you?
Leon loses himself in the monotony of the return journey. It's easy enough, the violence, the wrong. It is hidden behind the curtains of duplicity as he holds up his usual difficulty in speaking to anyone but his family and lets everyone assume it is an unwillingness to share. He performs exactly as they expect him to, and asks no questions when they wish him to overlook their filthy failings, knowing that his sin is greater than they could ever bear. Stone cannot be crushed. Yet Leon feels remarkably like olives in an oil press, producing something to burn away for light. Still, if even this light is tainted in the way it wilts the asphodels of peace - of course it wilts peace, when peace comes with the erasing of memories.
He cannot find it in himself to let go of the twisting wish to see the world with two sisters on his arm.
Once you have had something precious, is it even acceptable - would he ever find it in himself to forgive letting Jillian down? To let her go? To release her hand and watch the space she had once been in become just empty air once again?
Once you have had something precious, how do you find it in yourself to give up on it?
Would it be so wrong to commit more faults, for the sake of living? To live is to hurt people, so they say, with your flaws. So if that's the case, Leon wonders in his bunk, staring at the gaps between the boards knitting together the ceiling; was it okay to be brought into this world? Why did she shape him into this path of suffering? Why did she want him to want anything he could not keep, to hurt people in chasing after what he wanted?
The world is so wide, Leon finds as he journeys through valleys and mountains with his muted prisoner. It fills him with the loss of everything that he cannot remember, every beauty of a potential moment that he can't fully absorb. To live is to lose. To want is to be disappointed.
So how come he is so drunk on pleasure? Every new sensation, every silly little tradition. Every culture, every custom he comes across. Every new person who sees even a shred of something interesting and new and verdant in him - he records it all in a logbook, scribbling away on blank, expensive page with pen, spending his days trying to catch up to the life he's been living in hopes that he can share everything with his sisters.
It was so much easier to understand the world with them by his side.
He finds that even after leaving their embrace, he had been shaped by the way they looked at him like he was something to be cherished.
Their eyes, on him, the fond weight of being known shaping him into the form of a boat.
Leon makes laurel leaves into little boats, fingers nimbly finding the instinctive shape that he considers nostalgic. The first trip into the world - both the place he lost someone, the place he had to find it in himself to take up the responsibility for living and hurting someone with his existence - yes, both of these, but also the memory of Sharlene struggling to carry her luggage onboard, panting and sweating, Jillian dragging him around the gallery by the arm, the sensation of leaving land behind and patting his sisters' back in turn when they got seasick.
Setting off to sea, like the act of living - unmoored from safety, fraught with expectations and danger - Leon hopes that the boats reach his sister.
That somehow, their paths will cross again.
He wishes for them to have the chance to take a better voyage together.
He hopes his sister will get to change the way she sees the sea, that he will get to overwrite this painful feeling with the exuberance of living. That a day will come when they are once again side by side, smiling without a need to hold up the corners of the mouth as if they were having unwanted company. If things can get better, is it okay to live on searching for her?
(Isn't it a victory just to be able to live on, apart, but stubbornly trying to return to another's side?)
He pushes them into the calm waters whenever the tide is falling in low, relishing the way the tide laps against his ankles (he can't help it) and hopes the fortune of the same fate that took her away will see fit to bring their little, desperate, gestures together like clasped hands trying not to be pulled apart by a large crowd.
Leon would tear apart the world to live, to be happy, but what is so very wrong with being desperate to search for something? Is it wrong, he asks himself, to hurt someone in search for someone else to care for, someone who needs to be seen tenderly? This one person, who has already waited so long - for himself and her, he keeps folding the laurel leaf boats.
The sheen of softly glowing sun falls tiredly over boats pulled away by the currents.
To live is to bear being worn away, afterall. To live is to turn to stone but walk regardless. Leon's legs and hands have gone entirely back to movable stone, but they can fix that when they meet again. When Jillian comes back to complete the three of them.
On that day, Leon hopes quietly, it will be as though everything can be mended.
On that day, his rock-hard heart will become flesh soft to the touch once again.
Forgiveness, he flings to the back of his mind as he stumbles on through the world like a blind man, hoping desperately to reach the hands of those he wants to see again, as desperately as the instant he ran to reach Jillian and could not quite make it. Everything else unimportant and unnoticed in his wake as he crawls toward his goal.
Was it that he didn't qualify for happiness, despite how having hesitated to try and grab it with both hands? Or was it the scheme of some mysterious figure standing by the loom of the fates? Could it have been merely coincidence?
Still, he calls out the name with a familiar breath into the night air, keeping the vigil, waiting with prayer.
In order to sail together again, to get it right this time, to exist alongside you,
To need you, and have that need fulfilled,
This is my answer - yes.
What is there that I am not willing to do?