FANDOM: Original Work
SERIES: FOTSM Verse
RATING: General Audiences
WORDCOUNT: 503
PAIRING(S): -
CHARACTER(S): Alamatheï, Alamatheï’s father (and his dragon Tu’aran), Alamatheï’s dragon
GENRE: Bittersweet fluff?
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None
SUMMARY: There are things Alamatheï can feel that others can’t.
DEDICATION(S): -
NOTE(S): This is a rewrite of this piece from 2010, about the first time Alamatheï experiences the magic he got from his mother. @misericordemika asked where she could read about Matheï and Izayah so I figured I’d crosspost stuff...but then the writing style was just unacceptable tbh, hence the rewriting :P
✗ THE FIC
Alamatheï giggles when his feet land on the dark ground and a soft tingle climbs up his legs, slips between his toes into his shins and the bones of his knees like ants racing in his blood.
“What is it, baby?”
“It tickles!” Alamatheï laughs, covering his mouth with chubby fingers, “There's something in the ground!”
He giggles again, hopping from foot to foot to escape the odd sensation even as he goes to retrieve his dragon—only a hatchling still. She doesn't even have a name, yet—from under Tu'aran's left wing. The tickles in his legs don't ease up though, rising and falling like a dragon between wing strokes, and it reminds Alamatheï of his nights in the egg farm, heat from the shells tucked into his stomach, his back, his neck. He smiles.
“I don't know what it is,” he says with a giggle, toe squirming in his sandals, “but I like it!”
Alamatheï's father stands very straight by his side, his back rigid under the pristine wine-red and white tunic. He looks all serious and grim, like always, but the amber of his skin looks duller today, and his hair lost some of its snowy shine. When he looks down at Alamatheï though, it is with the same shiny eyes and downward tilt to his lips, and the hand he uses to muss up Alamatheï's brown hair is as rough as ever.
“It's your mother's gift,” he sighs with a nod at the mountain-like trunk in front of them, mottled with houses and palaces hidden in the branches, “It's yours to understand.”
He takes his hand off in his custom, abrupt way—like it was never really there in the first place—and Matheï's gaze falls to his feet and the thick sheet of rotten leaves poking between his toes, questions crawling in his mind like skargnes on his feet. If this came from his mother, he knows, Alathian won't answer any more question on the topic.
It's the tree.
Matheï spins on his heels and turns back to Tu'aran, whose large, scaly head has tilted, his better ear turned toward the higher branches.
“What is it doing?”
It breathes.
Alamatheï follows the dragon's gaze up, toward the topmost branches of the queen-tree where elves and leafers swing from one branch to the next, run between leaves taller than they are and call each other out with sounding horns and shrieks of laughter. The light is different here—it tastes greener on his skin, wetter too—but the people in the trees look like falling stars and the earthly feel of dead leaves fills Matheï with the same rush of happiness as sunrise does—like breakfast, only better.
He stares into the sunlight filtering through the branches and thinks of his mother's green eyes, her earth-colored skin. Maybe one day, she'll come back, and he'll be able to ask if she can feel the tree breathing, too. For now, he turns to Tu'aran, grins, and says:
FANDOM: Original Fiction
SERIES: FOTSM Verse
RATING: General Audiences
WORDCOUNT: 1 428
PAIRING(S): Alamatheï's Parents
CHARACTER(S): Alamatheï, AlamatheÏ's parents.
GENRE: Break up fic.
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None
SUMMARY: No one but myself decides who I should be bound to –and I will not be bound to the new you.
DEDICATION(S): -
NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in August 2013.
✗ THE FIC
He finds her at the very edge of the clearing, with a bag of food and a sheepskin of water as her only baggage, her cape tightly wrapped around herself to keep the cold out.
He breathes hard, as he always does, and she knows without turning that his forehead must be covered in sweat, that his son –the dragons’ son- is probably somewhere close behind, trailing his father and his dragon like a duckling every time they are near… not her though. Never her.
She wouldn’t want him to, either.
She never wanted a child, and would have been happy to remain alone with him forever, but the Split, and her subsequent transformation, quickened her womb again. She had thought –hoped- that she would remain barren, that no life would come to invade a body she had suffer in, to live in despite the loss of everything she once was.
When her blonde hair became brown, when her skin turned from a slight tan to the deep brown of soft earth, when she started feeling sap flowing through the trees, she had thought it would be the last of her unwanted changes.
She remembers the way he hugged her when it was all over, when they were both alive and free of pain –orphans, yes, having lost all family to the Split, but alive and together still. They had left the southern cities, gone to the mountains to accommodate his newfound need for life –oh, how embarrassing it was to watch him shed his cape, his shirt, and then even breeches to walk outside, how difficult to accept the necessity of his near-nakedness… her own bare feet were a small thing by comparison, her urge to climb trees from time to time, an easy concession.
Then they had reached the mountains, and found cadavers where they had expected dragons.
Thousands of them littering the ground, flying dragons mangled from thousands feet falls, boulder dragons lying there like rocks from an avalanche, running dragons with their skeletons stretched as far as it would go, as if they’d been caught mid-run, stopped by what she would learn was the sudden onslaught of every living being’s thoughts and hopes and fear… and their pain, too.
They never went that far north, but she learned later that swimming dragons, although those with the most population left thanks to the distance they could put between bipeds and themselves, had suffered, too. In total, less than a thousand dragons survived the Split, and those who did had died by the hundred before anyone understood what it was they needed.
And then, when they arrived, he was bound.
“Saÿla,” he says, stopping at the first three stubs, “why are you going outside alone? You know the protection runes are lost! If a predator should attack you—”
He trails off, abruptly, the same way he does whenever his dragon tries to speak in his head.
The dragons –because the dragons are always the ones dictating things- that once an elf and a hatchling join their minds, they are bound… she doesn’t like to admit it, but on this at least they are right. Alathian is bound to his dragon, joined at the hip, even.
Since they have been there, he has never done anything without it, never done anything that wasn’t for it. She may not love the child she bore, she may not have wanted him, but she never forgot about him. He does. Always gone traveling, looking for other elves to trick into this life of caring for eggs, cleaning scales, building houses in a network of caves no elf had ever been allowed to see before… how ironic, truly, that these creatures, who used to eat elves and dwarves alike, demand things from them, were now completely unable to survive without them.
And how truly despicable, that all of them –not only him, but all of those who came here- should measure their own worth by the amount of use they are to the dragons, that they would go so far as to let dragons raise their own children!
“I don’t care about attacks,” she tells the forest before her, smiling slightly when she realizes she means it. “I am sick of this place.”
“Saÿla, I know this isn’t perfect, and the caves weren’t build for elves,” he apologizes, “but the dragons—”
“Dragons!” she spits, turning back to round on him, “Dragons are all you ever speak about!”
He takes a step back when she reaches him, the light of his skin flickering as his white hair flies in the wind, and the dull thud of a toddler’s bottom hitting soft ground drifts to her ears, almost lazily.
“I never wanted a child!” She continues, punching him in the chest –with little effect, if any. “You were the one who cried with joy once we realized I was pregnant! You were the one who promised the boy to always be there for him, you should be the one caring for him, not some kind of glorified firesnake!”
At their feet, the child is cooing, laughing at the way the earth ripples around his mother’s –her feet. He looks strange with his golden eyes and brown hair, unlike any elf she has met after the Split, but even she can see he is a lively, happy child. Even she can see there is no reason someone who wishes to be a parent should leave him behind.
“You don’t care for him!” her lover –former lover now- protests. “You said yourself that you wanted nothing to do with him!”
“And I don’t,” she confirms, “I never lied! You, on the other hand, swore you would be by his side forever, and that you would care for him, but you don’t!” She huffs. “I may be a bad mother, but at the very least I am not a liar!”
She pauses, breathing hard, to tug her skirts away from the child’s grabby hands –she will not be tricked into assuming a role she never wanted in the first place. She has money. She knows her herbs. She will drink the cycle drink every day of her life if she has to, but she will not bear another child, and she will not be a mother if she can help it.
“These creatures used to eat us not eight centuries ago,” she reminds the other elf, “they used to treat us like excrement and despise us –maybe they respect those of us who are bound to them, but I am not. I am still free, and I will remain free. No one but myself decides who I should be bound to –and I will not be bound to the new you.”
Before the Dragons –before the Split, before many things, he would not have backed down.
She was a noble and he a mere stable boy, but he never learned to stop trying, never took no for an answer unless it came from her and that was one of the reasons she fell for him. She had loved how he refused to let anyone but her decide if she was good enough for her –he had seemed to understand that she was not a piece of merchandise to be traded off… but she has not seen any of this since they met the dragons, and today is the day she stops pretending she has any hope of it ever coming back.
Not for her, at least.
“I know what I risk by leaving,” she says, setting her gaze south once more, “but I also know what I will lose if I stay. For your son’s sake,” she concludes with a sigh, “I hope you realize what you have let go of, too.”
The first step is the hardest.
But then, as she makes her legs keep working, each new move is easier than the last, and her breathing eases into the familiar pattern of long walks and hot days spent running in the threes with her brothers, her shoulders settle in the feeling she could go anywhere like this.
There is a very distinct possibility that she will die before she reaches whatever is left of the city she was born in, but at least if she dies, she will die on her own terms.
(Much, much later, she meets a young elf with the droopy ears of light elves and the same brown hair as her own, and she figures her parting words must have had some kind of impact on his father, after all.)
FANDOM: Original Work
SERIES: FOTSM Verse
RATING: General Audiences
WORDCOUNT: 3 356
PAIRING(S): Alamatheï/Izayah
CHARACTER(S): Alamatheï, Izayah.
GENRE: Friends to lover
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None
SUMMARY: You can take a sand elf out of the desert, but you’re always going to find sand in the folds of their clothes -and you can’t expect an Order-born elf not to think it’s itchy.
DEDICATION(S): -
NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in August 2013.
✗ THE FIC
“Did you know,” Alamatheï asks when he pushes his head and silly, spiked hair through the door of Izayah’s preparation room, “that some of the Sunlit elves from the north pierce their nipples so they can put silver spikes through them?”
“You are forbidden from even thinking about it,” Izayah warns without raising his gaze from the cataplasm he was preparing, “until you learn not to put your nipples in my eyes everywhere I go.”
Alamatheï laughs, and the tips of his ears glow a bright, warm yellow, not unlike summer sun filtering through the leaves at the edge of a forest.
It often comes along with Alamatheï’s laughter, but Izayah has never heard of anyone else noticing this, perhaps because rarely anyone but Matheï comes into this office aside from other Healers in need of advice -and even then, Izayah rarely is their first choice.
When he was young, quite a while ago now, Izayah had only ever met people of his stature -which is to say people who rarely ever reached six feet of height, let alone Matheï’s ridiculous height of six feet and eleven inches… between his nature and the ridiculous hairdo adding to his height, it is honestly no wonder he keeps complaining about medicinal herbs getting lost in his hair.
Even now, he walks bent almost in half to avoid brushing with the bouquets of plants, hands constantly busy brushing away the grain and dried leaves that keep falling on his naked torso, occasionally catching in the fabric of his loincloth, just where slope of his hips drive them toward his groin… Izayah snaps his gaze back to its normal level, rolls his eyes when he is once again assaulted by Matheï’s nipples right in front of him, then cranes his head back to hear what his friend has to say.
“If you keep saying things like this,” Matheï chuckles, “the rumors concerning our uh… how do they put it again?”
“Frustratingly oblivious love affair,” Izayah mumbles as he goes back to his cataplasm, tugging at the edge of his headscarf –perhaps he shouldn’t have gone for the fitted cap this morning, and chosen a looser veil instead.
“Ah,” Alamatheï chuckles with something akin to fondness in his voice, “yes. And they say we lost poetry the day the Gods gave us magic.”
Izayah rolls his eyes at his cataplasm, then takes out the fabric he uses to wrap it so he can finish the preparation –the patient in the healing ward of the Flying Riders’ dispensary may be alone, but she won’t wait for her medication forever, whether Izayah has a visit or not.
Besides, the room is getting too warm, despite the breeze coming in through Izayah’s small window, the cold wind of summer at the top of a mountain.
“If you keep smiling when you refer to those rumors,” Izayah says, pouring the cataplasm out of his mortar and onto the fabric, “people are going to think you enjoy them… or worse, spread them.”
Alamatheï’s laughter slips between the herbs on the ceiling, fills the room and flies out through the window, the sound almost tangible, tingling on Izayah’s skin.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Matheï chuckles once he calms down, “when I want to bed someone I proposition them, I don’t spread rumors.”
“The rumors mention a love affair,” Izayah points out, slipping under Matheï’s arm to reach the door and cross into a large hall full of beds surrounded by drapes, “not mere sexual intercourses.”
“As if they were mutually exclusive,” Alamatheï scoffs, following Izayah to lone child in the infirmary –a girl of the Blue Blood whose first menstruations are proving to be particularly straining, “or always linked, for that matter.”
“Many would disagree with you,” Izayah tells him while he adjusts the cover around his patient.
Alamatheï who, as always, focused on the dragon rather than the rider, doesn’t even pretend to consider the possibility and dismisses it with a swipe of his hand:
“Nonsense,” he says, “Anyone with a grain of sense knows an elf’s worth isn’t to be measured by how many partners they bedded… ask any of those who shared my bed, and you will see.”
Izayah finishes arranging the cataplasm on his patient’s forehead, then turns to look at Alamatheï’s profile.
His eyes are fixed on the dragonling as he inspects its wings with relaxed fingers –while Izayah’s are tightly clenched in the fabric of his ample green tunic, his lose desert pants shifting in time with the movement of his legs.
“It’s easy for you to say,” Izayah remarks, “when you only ever bedded people like you.”
The light in Matheï’s skin dulls, leaving his whole body looking darker, closer to brown than its usual amber shade.
“People like me?”
“People who know nothing of life,” Izayah says, then bites his tongue hard enough to draw blood.
“Nothing of—”
Leaving Alamatheï speechless is a rare exploit, but it usually feels a lot more satisfying.
“I mean,” Izayah pushes out, watching color flee from his knuckles, his tunic bunch between his fingers, “You have no idea what it is like in the real world. What society is like, what it is like to be different from them….”
“Oh,” Alamatheï retorts, “you mean the way you are different? Hiding behind all this fabric and trying to make people forget you have a body only because you are so scared of it?”
“I am not scared of my own body!” Izayah protest, feeling like his cheeks are about to take fire as he rises from his seat and sends his stool to the ground, “I never was!”
Below him, the girl stirs, and Alamatheï answers him with an angry hiss, fingers clenching into fists at his side:
“Then why is it you haven’t taken anyone to your bed yet, uh? Do not think I will believe your heartless façade, Izayah, I was there when you came to the Order, I saw how much you truly feel… you have never taken any lover, but not for lack of loving. Why is it, if not for fear of your own body?”
Alamatheï rose, too, although he didn’t disturb any furniture.
At first, Izayah steps back when he advances, but when Alamatheï gets too close he spins under his arm, then puts distance between them so as not to have to break his neck in order to look Alamatheï in the eyes.
This is ridiculous. They have known each other for almost two millennia, but Izayah cannot quite recall ever being that angry at Alamatheï –then again, they have never had this conversation before, either.
“I simply do not wish to take a lover,” Izayah hisses. Then, before Alamatheï can call him a liar: “I have no wish to bed anyone… ever –and the only fear that I feel is of what people would do if they found out!”
“Nothing!” Alamatheï answers with his eyes wide with shock, his voice still hushed –Izayah can hear the blankets shuffle on the bed though, the girl’s breathing quickening. “Nothing is what they’d do, so why does it even matter that you are different? Nobody is going to force you to do something you have no desire for! This isn’t how couples work!”
“Not here!” Izayah all but yells, “but back home—”
“Home?”
Never before has Izayah seen the fight go out of Alamatheï.
He knows what Matheï looks like when he is tired, and sad, and joyful –when he is angry, thankful, optimistic, determined… defeated doesn’t suit him.
“I cannot believe you still think of it as home,” he says, voice almost too low for Izayah to hear, “I found you almost dead from heat and cold, from hunger and thirst, and all that without taking into account whatever they did to you that made you leave in the first place, and you still think of it as home?”
The way Alamatheï spits the word sounds remarkably like the intonation Izayah’s mother uses to speak of her native tribe, but now is certainly not the time to bring this up… then again, at this point there might not be anything Izayah should bring up, and so he doesn’t move when Alamatheï spins on his heels and leaves the infirmary without even bothering to fake pain when his forehead hits the threshold on his way out.
Izayah slams the door to his makeshift office and decides crushing herbs is more urgent than composing replies to the various letters he got from other Healers asking for advice and information.
{ooo}
Patrol leaves Izayah in dire need of a bath and a long, full night of sleep.
Although the bath can definitely wait.
Walking for hours on end, even at night, is nothing Izayah was ever unfamiliar with, even long before he came to the Order. In the desert, not everybody has a mount to carry them, and when they do, more often than not it is the luggage that ends up on its back, along with children and those whose condition doesn’t allow for long hikes –and the warrior, of course.
Women mount as soon as they can fight.
Boys and men, well.
They have good legs.
Izayah knows his bedchambers as well as the back of his hand which is why, on full moons like tonight, he hardly ever bothers to light a candle… which in turn explains why he startles when he comes back from his bathing alcove and discovers two spots of lights shining above his bed, spread the exact width of Alamatheï’s ears.
“Haven’t you mastered the art of shining everywhere by now?” Izayah asks, letting his hand fall away from the clasp of his headscarf.
“You of all people should know that I can’t,” Alamatheï answers. “My magic doesn’t work this way.”
Neither does Izayah’s… in his case, blood magic is his dominant one, but the rest on his ancestry shows in the way he can make his eyes shine when he needs to, the two paths of light looking like smaller beacons in the night.
Alamatheï’s dominant magic may be light, but the way it mixed with earth magic still means he cannot use it as a full-blooded Sundwelling elf would.
“Have you come to fight again?”
Neither of them is moving, and Izayah keeps his back straight, his face blank, even though he knows Alamatheï is practically blind at night… moving means breaking the thin status quo they have right now, and not necessarily for the best.
There’s no need to risk making a bad situation become worse.
“I wanted to apologize.”
Alamatheï’s arm comes forward, and the smell of wildflowers drifts to Izayah’s nostrils, sweet, cloying, and somewhat tired from the wait. He takes a cautious step forward, then takes the bouquet -a little worse for the wear- from Alamatheï’s hand and feels his way to the pitcher he keeps in his bedchambers, making sure there is some water left before he arranges the flowers in it.
“So did I,” Izayah says without turning away from the flowers.
From the corner of his eyes, he can see the light of Alamatheï’s ears flicker as he shakes his head, but aside from that slight movement he is notably still -something that rarely ever happens when Matheï is not injured.
For a long while, neither of them speaks, Izayah pretending he is still fiddling with the flowers, back burning with the weight of whatever Matheï isn’t saying… though to be fair, it isn’t like he is volunteering any word of his own.
Alamatheï, as is often the case, breaks the silence first, with a sigh.
“I realized you were right,” he admits, dejection clear in his voice, “I did only bed Order-born elves.” A chuckle, humorless. “Considering how few of us are even within my age range, it is amazing I never noticed this before.”
“I suppose you were looking for people who would understand you,” Izayah tells him with a slight shrug. “People who wouldn’t be hurt at the thought of you only wanting their bodies for a few nights, and nothing more… the elves from outside did not have the father that you had.”
“Dragons,” Alamatheï corrects. “The dragons raised me, not my father.”
Izayah turns back toward him, eyebrows furrowed.
“I did not know this.”
“Oh, not many people know, and few of us even remember it… I think Zoanie might remember some of it. Probably.” Alamatheï shrugs again, and this time Izayah leaves his spot near the drawers to go and sit next to him, shoulders bumping together in the process. “Elves suffered a lot from the Split -I think we lost over half of our population of the time?” Izayah nods. “Dragons though… Aleenya says there were about five hundreds of them left when she came to the Mountains of Leaves.”
Izayah nods, perplexed by this piece of history he never learned about.
Classes at the Order aren’t… well. They aim to make sure everyone will be able to complete the tasks assigned to them, and that they will trust both their fellow Dragonriders and the Order itself not to disintegrate around them… for now, what they need above all is cohesion, not history.
Beside, having spoken with a few survivors of the Split, Izayah knows it isn’t an experience that is easily recounted.
He can only imagine what it was like, to be one of the Old Elve and suddenly feel your body changing to accomodate magic, to watch your friends and children die all around you and wonder whether or not you would survive, to hear the scream of people whose body rejected magic and died for it… that can’t have been easy.
(Izayah has seen elves die this way before. Elflings, born without the ability to adapt to magic, but older elves, too, adults who had time to build a life and family before the first signs started showing, people who would cry and hold their loved ones, and eventually begged for an end to their misery.
He remembers every single one of their faces.)
“How many riders?” Izayah asks when it seems like Matheï won’t speak again of his own volition.
“Two hundreds,” he says. “Maybe three. Some dragons survived longer without protection -I know of at least two of them who are alive and unbound today, though they avoid coming around. Most of the eggs didn’t survive back then, a lot didn’t even hatch. The memories aren’t very neat, I was so young… but I remember my father and the others were constantly gone, bringing any and everyone they could find to the mountain so the dragonlings could find partners. The children were left with the dragons… they fed us, raised us, taught us to survive. How did you think I knew how to hunt bare-handed?”
Alamatheï’s grin is sharp when he turns it toward Izayah, but there is a downward tilt to it that shouldn’t belong there, a hint of things he Matheï never shared with Izayah before –it makes his stomach clench with something he cannot name, sour and just shy of painful.
“Back then, only one out of ten eggs used to survive, and our parents didn’t have time for us. I remember sleeping with the eggs and listening to their heartbeats, the sound of their minds… when they died, it was like losing a friend, a sibling, almost.”
Matheï’s face turns to the flowers in their vase, the drawer Izayah’s only luxury, and when he continues the story it sounds like he wandered far away from the room, to times Izayah never experienced.
“I’ve never known any other life than this… I was twenty when Father and Seelim were bound. Dragons cared about the other children already, and I spent most of my time with them… Mother left three years later. The Order is the only home I have ever known, and the Dragons my only family…” Matheï hunches on himself, trying to make himself look smaller as he adds quietly: “It hurts to know you don’t think of us as home.”
“I try to,” Izayah tells him, trying to see his own hands in the dark, “I really do. You know what they say though, you can take an elf out of the desert, but you will always find sand in the folds of their clothes.”
Alamatheï nods, but it doesn’t feel sincere, doesn’t feel like he truly understands, so Izayah braces himself and continues:
“My mother was raped,” he says, feeling Matheï stiffen beside him. “Her birth tribe chased her, and she joined the tribe I grew up in as a last resort. She did her best, but she never quite managed to love me, and my ears…” Izayah tugs at the hem of his headscarf, heart beating hard in his chest. “She never managed to look at them. I don’t blame her for not loving me. I merely wish she could have. But,” he adds, straightening and adding strength to his own voice, “she always made sure I would be as safe as possible. So when my thousandth name day came and went, she was the one who urged me to live… before my wife could make me take my headscarf off and reveal what I was, you see?”
Matheï’s hand finds Izayah’s where it is still torturing the fabric of his headscarf, and he threads their fingers together –Izayah’s skin tingles where they touch.
“They would have shunned me. Killed me, maybe. She never could love me, but she still took a risk to preserve my life so…” the next breath is difficult to take, doesn’t quite want to come in, but Izayah forces on: “I love her, and I… I love my tribe, too but they only-they wouldn’t have loved me if they’d known who I was, if they’d known-if they’d know I wasn’t interested in coupling and-”
Izayah feels Matheï pull him to his chest just as his eyes start to sting, the taste of salt spills on his lips, like white-hot desert sand leaving burning trails on the skin of his cheeks, a sandstorm raging in his chest, fueled with debris he wasn’t ever conscious of.
It lasts, and lasts, and lasts –Izayah can hear Shra’an in the back of his mind, shouting and worrying, but it is difficult to hear him, as if his own spirit were clouded with whatever it is he is expelling until, at long last, Izayah stops shaking, his breathing stops hitching, and Shra’an stops asking.
Matheï’s arms around his waist almost hurt, and Izayah’s tunic feels wet where the other elf’s head is resting.
Izayah can’t help the chuckle that escapes him.
“I think this is the hardest I’ve cried in over four millenniums,” he says between two fits of laughter, “I feel ridiculous!”
Alamatheï snorts so hard he doesn’t even bother to wipe the tears from his face before he falls into a hysterical fit of laughter that soon has him literally fall off the bed –Izayah wonders, not for the first time, how he manages not to make the ground shake.
Afterward, when both of them are spent and breathing hard, Alamatheï’s ears glowing bright where he lies of the floor, Izayah sighs and smiles, chest warmer than it was before as he unclasps his headscarf tosses it on the bed, then unties his hair and lets it fall around his face and down to his waist.
For one moment, everything is silent as they breathe out the last of their hysteria, Izayah settling at the edge of the bed, face hanging above the ground so that his hair brushes against Matheï’s cheek. When the other elf looks up, Izayah remembers he never did take his headscarf off in front of anyone since he came to the Order and expects some form of comment on this.
What he gets instead is:
“You’re glowing.”
Izayah grunts and throws a pillow at Alamatheï’s face, instructing him to make himself comfortable wherever he wants.
(He meant the ground, but there is something to be said about waking up with the heartbeat of someone you trust thumping in your ear.)
