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Sweet falls the twilight across the countryside, rolling fiery vermillions and velvety purples in a blanket across the sky. Bright come the stars, glittering in their firmament, pinpricks of golden yellow and cool cerulean. Quiet rush the waves, whispering over sandy shores, licking naked toes as the bubbling froth of the surf surges over and around flesh and bone.
There stands Neuvillette in the oncoming twilight, his pants rolled over his knees, his shirt undone, his hair loose. Silvery strands of it catch on an errant breeze, dancing behind him, and he regards the stars in their heavenly home. From a distance, perhaps as far from Neuvillette in this moment as the stars themselves, Wriothesley watches. Quiet, contemplative. A faint smile plays across his lips, the expression impossible to resist. Neuvillette is impossible to resist, his gravity greater than that of celestial bodies.
They stand in the quiet, the two of them, the surf lapping over Neuvillette’s feet and swirling around his ankles as the wind plays with his hair—and Wriothesley watches still, unwilling to interrupt. But Neuvillette knows he’s there, as he always does, attuned to the water in all living things, and he turns, catching his hair behind the pointed tip of one ear. “Forgive me,” he says. “Here, it is easy for me to lose myself in thought.” Here at the end of Fontaine’s great sea, at the very edge of her landmass where few dare tread, Neuvillette has always found peace. He has carved out this space, this quiet place, his sanctuary from the storms of polite society.
And, now, he invites Wriothesley in, but Wriothesley stands at the edge of the grassy path leading from cottage to ocean, where green gives way to so much pale brown silica. “No, I didn’t mean to disturb you.” His faint smile becomes a lopsided grin in the dying light of the day, and for Neuvillette it is brighter than the stars, the moon, the sun itself, though for Wriothesley it is merely another smile.
“Impossible,” Neuvillette says.
“This is your space,” Wriothesley replies.
Neuvillette holds out one delicate hand, fine-boned and long-fingered, so elegant. He beckons Wriothesley forward, and Wriothesley, a planet pulled by a star, leaves his shoes on the edge of his world to join Neuvillette on the shores of his. This cottage at the edge of Fontaine, the night, the water, all are Neuvillette’s. Safety and safe harbor, a quiet refuge, singular solitude. But, now, a tether between here and there, a bond strengthened between Neuvillette and the world he still doesn’t entirely understand, one that makes him more human even as he has become more dragon. “And now it is yours, too,” he says, leaning back, and Wriothesley takes his weight, supporting him, cradling him.
Full dark, now, the sky above. The sea of the universe cuts a glittering line through the pitch of the heavens. Isolation isn’t protection. There is safety in the arms of another.
The waves lap at their toes.