whispers 5 times the love
5 times he fell in love // accepting
un. what is the kindest thing you almost did?
They talk of a boy so beautiful he rips the heavens apart with his bare hands.
A royal, they tell him in hush tones over dinner, in whispers and smiles like someone could be listening. A royal, they coo to Milk, so stunning he parts the battlefield like tales of old— war dares not touch an angel of death. They laugh at their own fantasies as they talk of his eyes, so dreamy you can see the stars, of long lashes, kisses in their own right, a touch like honey, sweet and alluring.
But they do not tell him of the scar.
It scores across the bridge of his pale moon face— like nohr itself has sunk its gnarled claws into his flawless skin, a reminder of the reality they live in. His lips look as though they have not seen the grace of laughter in years. The air around him tastes of melancholy, not sweet summer flowers.
Kane is not a dream. Kane is not a fallen angel.
And yet he rips heaven out of Milk with his bare hands.
deux. should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong as you were doing it?
Milk is presented with a cup.
It is ornate, almost embarrassingly so, lovingly carved and embellished and heavy in Milk’s hands as he takes it with a silent nod from his kneeling position. ( it is the first time he has been smaller than someone in all of his years, not only in body but in spirit. ) They say it represents the weights of the sins he will have to burden. Milk can taste them in his mouth like acid as they tip wine into the golden curve. Red. Deep, deep red.
They say it carries the weight of his duties from this point forward. One of the men presents a knife that glints in the ceremony candlelight. Its handle is just as ornate as the cup— two halves of the same whole, though they could not differ more.
They say it is the weight of his unwavering loyalty to him. To Kane. The knife flashes again and Milk closes his eyes as the blade touches Kane’s palm.
The blood is mixed with wine, two luxurious reds combining into a color so unearthly rich that Milk knows he will never see it again in his life. He raises the cup to his lips, heavy with unspoken promises. He swallows hard and tastes like he imagines his death will feel.
When he looks up, red running off his lips to the dip of his chin and down, down, down the slope of his neck, Kane is smiling. It’s Kane making his heart race in more than one way, his blood is in Milk’s veins, in the heat of his face. This is loyalty. Blood for blood.
trois. is there anything you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it?
They sit on a staircase in the grand hall, Kane throned one step higher so their faces nearly touch. The book in Milk’s hands is heavy with the unknown, but Kane is patient as he listens to the broken words that stutter out of Milk’s broken lips, the makings of a fable that he pulls through teeth like smoke.
“Not quite,” Kane says, hand to the print, his voice like the dying light. “Try again.”
“Humans in love are terrible.”
quatre. what is it about death that you’re afraid of?
There is ink on his hands, smudged into the cracks of his palms that rubs onto the page when Milk drags his pen across the war-torn passage again. Destruction follows in his wake. The book beneath him is nearly black with edits; footnotes, annotations, arrows pointing to each word, markings of letters and phrases and comments and the wreckage of a language Milk is desperate to understand. He can hear Kane’s voice in his mind: “Try again.”
He marks and marks, a mission no one send him on, hand steady despite the tremble that aches to show. One day he’ll know. One day he can read this all to Kane by the light of a fire, fog in the windows instead of behind his eyes. One day he will be someone that Kane isn’t embarrassed to announce as his retainer. Maybe Kane’s voice will be a sunrise again.
The carnage is paused for just a moment.
Humans in love are terrible.
In the hesitation there is a fire.
Love was a word he learned recently, though the feeling has been an ache in his chest his entire life. Now it has a name. There is a face to the cracks in his ribs, the light that pours through. Milk stares at the words again. Love. There is no word for the wildfire that claws down his throat.
When he crosses the passage out— deliberate, dark, a splinter of the deep nohrian sky trapped between the pages —he thinks of Kane. Humans in love are not terrible. Milk is not terrible. He is in love.
cinq. do you know what love is, or just the feeling?
He is flowers; the wishes you make on dandelions, the love-me-nots you pull from petals of the castles flower gardens, the stems woven into braids and pressed between over-inked pages of cracked-spine books. He is the heavens ripped open, the glitter sequin stars picked apart. He is the roar of an ocean that Milk has never seen, the wind in the reeds that Milk has never heard, every retelling of every broken story whispered between fractured kids on the streets, looking to survive. He is hope. He is Kane.
Milk can’t write the ways he feels, so he draws him. Thin, sketchy lines that share the secret curve of Kane’s cheek as he turns to tell Milk of a task he needs completed, the smile on his face— real and fake. It’s a love letter in it’s own regard, bound between the covers of a story never told.
He is the rain out the windows of the library, the soft sound of the downpour muffled between laughter and the firecracker lightning. He is the smile on Milk’s face every morning. He is death’s cold hands. He is the empty spaces on the page slowly being filled with declarations of love.
Milk turns the page. He begins again.
