Stavanger Bay You know my love can hold you down

Lmk if I should change anything, I've been sitting on this idea and decided to go for it <3 powerplay of Vairë and Blossom with permission!

Reverie had been wanting to do something nice for @Lestan for quite some time now. It was just — well, difficult to find the time between the intermittent chaos of their lives. And now... now didn't seem like the time at all, except perhaps that made it a perfect time. She wasn't really expecting romance, not while Lestan was still recovering from wounds both physical and emotional, but she hoped that she could bring him some measure of happiness.
She'd worked very hard at it, after all.
The gilded Mayfair had been preparing for days; each morning she rose with the sun, and set to work almost immediately. First, she chose a place: a quiet spot by the water's edge, a patch of sand surrounded by an uneven ring of large rocks. The space between was roughly large enough for two wolves, Reverie thought.
She had shifted some of the smaller rocks so they might have a clear view of the ocean, and padded the space in the middle with pelts of various creatures she'd hunted. This part took her the longest, because she only had a rough idea of how to prepare the pelts from when Lestan had done it. Several failed attempts ended up discarded just beyond the border of the bay before she'd achieved her goal.
The next part was easier. She hunted for them, and ended up with a pair of rabbits to show for her efforts. Along the way she stumbled across pale flowering vines, and a patch of wildflowers that almost matched Lestan's eyes; she collected both, and wound the vines around the rocks while the flowers were laid across their tops. But the final and most striking addition was something she found entirely by accident.
She'd found it the previous night, actually; she'd been restless, and had gone for a walk to think over her plans for the evening she hoped to spend with Lestan. In the depths of the forest of Stavanger Bay, she'd spotted a dim green light — and that was very curious to Reverie, who had never seen any light but that of the sun and the flames in this world. So she'd pursued the source, and found a fallen tree laden with mushrooms casting a ghostly glow about the place. They were beautiful.
So for the final touch she went now to that tree, and broke off several branches. She laid these carefully between the rocks, creating a sort of walled perimeter of phantom light and leaving the ocean-facing gap as the sole entrance to the space. The glow wasn't visible yet, not with the sun still out — but the light was rapidly fading. Sunset was approaching, and it was time to fetch Lestan.
Reverie had already indicated that he should wait for her in their den, to the best of her ability; she had asked Vairë to babysit Blossom for a time, too, though that had been far more difficult to communicate without common words between them. Now she went to Lestan, leading him with a soft touch and a light step to the space she had prepared for them. And all around them, the world slowly dimmed and turned to gold.

no its beautiful! <

lestan mayfair found himself fully diminished and his speech undone. he was haunted by dreams of what he had done, the guilt of it, the terror of turning to find reverie — it replayed in harsh lashings over and over, robbing him of dreams or sentiment or capacity, until he only rose to eat, drink, hunt, and sleep.
the deer the creek the mountain the fire lake
the cat;
the languages, twining.
silence filled their home and lestan had felt himself slide headlong into a malaise from which there was no reprieve. he slept. he stared off in long silence.
he had a warm look for blossom, but the shame of other conversations gnawed upon lestan, turning him to a tooth-marked bone.
he had seen reverie flitting in and out; he appreciated her recovery and how she had grown stronger, quiet but determined. the silver of this lining filled him with a brilliant relief, which made it somehow easier for lestan to accept his own decay.
gold now; the silver inside himself; he followed and inhaled to see at last the beauty when she had brought him to it, how like a luminescent sea of sandwater it seemed, and how he scarcely seemed alive in these seconds, detached and dangling on a precarious thread.
lestan wept.

<3

Reverie did not truly see any of it; the beauty of what she had worked so hard to create was ironically lost on her. She saw nothing but Lestan.
Lestan, crying; Lestan, lost in darkness even as she tried so desperately to surround him with light. She could only stifle her own surge of grief and kiss his cheek lightly, seeking now to guide him to the pelts and urge him to settle there. She hadn't meant to make him cry...
Suddenly she questioned all of her choices. Did Lestan even like flowers? Reverie settled a few of them gently against his paw, hoping he would truly look and see the care that had gone into selecting each one. She loved him, and each painstaking detail of this night she'd planned represented all the times she wished she could say those words. She fussed over a folded corner of one of the pelts, then straightened some of the flowers, and finally dared to look back at Lestan to see what he thought.

he thought;
you've worked so hard, in his eyes, reaching for hers; 
for him! for them!
lestan's face twisted; he wept; he wound her into his arms.
speech had still not returned, but he saw the winding flowers and her effort, the salt-wind and her devotion to making them a true home, and for all this he loved it, and her, very much.
the bluegold eyes were sweetened, soft. he ran his paw across one of the furs and sighed in truest bliss.

The moment she saw that familiar, heart-stopping shimmer of warmth in his eyes was to Reverie a small eternity. It was all at once the cold breath in her lungs and the sand beneath her and the open sky and tomorrow's sunrise and all of it, everything, and she felt lost. Everything.
She leaned into his embrace and kissed him, finding a sense of completion in Lestan's arms that filled her with dread. Everything. Even so, she was overcome with her own warmth. Distantly, idly, she marveled at the strangeness of it — to feel so much love, and so desperately hopeless for it. There was nothing for her but this, a reality in which the dreams of her youth were not only dead before their time but their remnants defiled and put on display in grotesque warning to herself. Do not dream again, the rotten smell reminded her constantly; you will only set it all alight for him.
Reverie shifted then, plagued by her own thoughts, wanting now to show Lestan the true purpose of this night. It was the memory of beauty, of a soaring feeling which had seemed to lift her from her own misery if only for a little while, which had first sparked her plans for this night. She reached for a carefully-wrapped bundle, two strips of the plant described to her by the witch folded in a large leaf, and unwrapped it slowly. Reverie could not tell Lestan that it was safe, that she knew this from experience, but hoped that he knew she would never put him in danger.
She offered one piece to her husband, and kept the other for herself. Her eyes asked if he trusted her.

lestan trusted her very much, for how could he not? he feared the new inabilities of his body would alienate reverie, or perhaps they had; he did not like to consider what she did on her forays, and so never asked after them.
but still he hesitated when she showed him such things; he paused to look around at her handiwork, at the hours of caring love with which she had wreathed their home and prepare it for the loveliness of their existence together.
and so he took one strip, hesitantly, and his bluegold eyes fell to his wife now, waiting for her to instruct him further in what lestan could only know as fae-magick.

She watched him with gentle encouragement in her eyes, and when he accepted the offering, Reverie took her own piece and chewed it slowly. She waited for him to do the same, and when she had swallowed the last of it, she started to groom the fur at his ruff gently.
Reverie would continue with these gentle affections until she noticed a change in Lestan. She watched him closely, not mindful of her own state in this moment. All the same, that familiar sense of euphoria started to bloom within her after a time. The worries of the weeks past fell away. Their journey, her sickness, Riordan; the weight of it seemed to lift as the minutes passed. And still she saw nothing but Lestan.

euphoria — fear.
a falling away; warm flesh, bright glowing.
his laughter and her own, twining as purely as it ever did.
no fear no fear no fear.
he fell into dreamful contemplation with her in his arms, and when he was at last relinquished, he slept a dreamless sleep.