Cerulean Cape levitation

staying vague!

when lestan at last parted ways with riordan, it was not immediately to @Reverie he returned. confounded in misery, languishing beneath his attempts to be understanding —! of course she had a past before him, that was not in question, but —
riordan, here, now.
it felt —
he dragged himself back to where reverie slept curled around blossom, dripping wet from the sea but clutching a medium fish of unknown species which he lay on the sand nearby.
he did not touch her, only sat straight-backed and staring toward the sea.
eventually she would come awake, eventually she would sit up and take the air and lestan would ask, "riordan?" in a hushed question that asked for every answer.

She came awake feverish and gasping, and in the next moment her gasps dissolved into sobs; tears born of coming awake confused and in such pressing discomfort. Reverie looked first for Blossom, and then - Lestan, Spoken nearly at the same time as his soft question. She looked up in confusion, meeting his eyes.
What? Reverie didn't quite comprehend. She swallowed hard and tried to stifle her tears, but could not bring herself to speak again. She could only look at him, a desperate question in her own eyes.

he wanted to go to her and yet he felt as though vines had encircled him, tied him. she was weeping, and a muscle along his jaw tensed. 
at last he crept closer. "what's wrong? what did you dream?" his voice felt as if it were floated.

In her distress Reverie did not notice Lestan's hesitation; she removed herself carefully from Blossom and all but threw herself into his arms. That I lost you, She cried into the fur at his neck. You - you left me, and everything was so dark. She knew that she wasn't making sense. The dream hadn't made sense. Lestan would never leave her, surely, not when he'd promised so many times that he would not.

"i'm not — i don't want to leave." he held her, feeling empty beneath the near-overwhelming glut of love which always passed over him in these moments.
lestan was silent now, wanting reverie to calm, wanting the same for himself.

She held tightly to him, as if he might slip away from her even now. Promise. Promise you won't, Reverie begged of him in a broken whisper. I can't - I don't want a life without you.
And maybe it was unreasonable of her to demand another promise based on — what? A dream? Yet it had felt so real, as deeply cutting as if it had truly happened. She couldn't know that it was because she had not been dreaming but remembering... and perhaps that was for the best.

but he did not promise, not this time; lestan, who was always filled with them, now kept reverie close in his arms.
"who is, who was — riordan, to you?"
his gaze lay open, without judgement, nor anger; a promise made could not be so unless he knew what she desired.

He did not promise.
She felt something crack in her as he questioned her, Riordan's name on his lips. Reverie was filled with a sudden fury to hear it. He is nothing to me, She hissed fiercely as she pulled from Lestan's embrace, meeting his eyes then. And she meant it, in this moment. Whatever he was - I don't know, to be honest, and I don't care. If you want him gone, then I'll tell him to go. I'll tell him right now.
You are the only one I see, Lestan, Reverie realized that she was trembling, and realized next that it was fear. He was going to leave, send her into that darkness, and she couldn't — she couldn't —

lestan blinked quickly but did not otherwise respond when reverie tore away, or so it felt; his arms hung bereft at her defiance, which to him solidified all those things he had contemplated while fishing and while walking the shore.
"he cares about you. knows about you." the words felt like gravel. "i wouldn't — i wouldn't ask him to leave."
"i just — what do you remember? how does he —" and why, why would she face him with such a tone if she did not know, truly?

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: Suicidal ideation

Reverie started to cry again; she tried not to, but she couldn't help it. I - I remember that I felt something for him once, but that's all, Her tone softened in defeat. Not anymore.
Are - are you - Are you going to leave me? She couldn't bring herself to say the words. Instead Reverie dissolved into sobs again, feeling suddenly and desperately hopeless. She did not want to live if living would be without Lestan. She couldn't. Wouldn't.
If he left her, then she would make sure that she never found out what it was like to live without him.

"no," lestan said softly, shaking his head to punctuate.
he opened his arms to her again, the tremour of them a plead in itself.
"he just knows — more than me, about you. that's all."
and still!

No. One word, but it meant the world to her. She tucked herself against him, this time with a fragility almost like a warning, like the shuddering of glass in the moment before it shatters. Reverie was quiet for a time, trying to calm herself, still trembling. She felt she had almost lost Lestan, and would not forget this feeling, not for a very long time.
The first stirrings of something like hatred took root in her heart, growing in a tangle around her image of Riordan.
We can fix that, She murmured after a little while, meeting his eyes now without breaking their contact. Fever still shone in her own gaze, but she thought nothing of it now. No pain could be greater than the threat of losing what was most precious to her. If - if you'll let me, I'll tell you - everything. All of it. I've always wanted to, but... it was never the right time.
It was not the right time even now, but could it wait any longer? She didn't think so.

lestan feared this.
but he wanted this also.
"yes." the smoke of his voice broke against the feverishness of her own. 
"tell me everything."

Pleaseeee let me know if you see any places where it doesn't make sense because I went cross-eyed editing this LMFAO

So she told him everything.

First, The Gilded Sea. She told him about Mother Rain and Father Fire, about her parents and their rules: always be devout, never ask questions, never dare to smile freely lest Father Fire see and strike them all down. They were expected to be pure and solemn and reverent at all times, assigned strict roles by gender and by devotion. Dancers and singers were to exist separately; women were expected to be passive, and men were expected to provide. Marriage and children — in that order, of course — were sacred, paramount, an inevitable end-goal to their lives. At this she hesitated, her eyes darkening with guilt and shame and sorrow.
She went on to explain their rituals, the necessity of flamesingers to keep the fire at bay and raindancers to call down the clouds. She told him about the twins and how they'd been blessed, about Rose and how she'd been cursed, and how Reverie had loved all of them anyway.
She described each of the siblings who had raised her: Atlas and his questing wisdom, Opal and her steadfast strength, Rose and her boundless wonder. Her littermates too: Athens who had always been so quiet and contemplative, Win who never could keep a thought to herself, Tybault who was rarely anything but stern. At Tybault's name she paused, and confessed something she had never admitted to anyone, hardly even to herself: that her training to become a healer had been tainted and twined with Tybault's training as a warrior, that he had hurt innocents at the behest of their father only for her to tend their injuries. But Reverie did not linger on that.
She told Lestan about endless nights, dancing for hours to call the rains, and the breathless exhausted mornings when those first cool droplets fell. The way the heat shimmered above the ground on the hottest days. The hatred she'd always had for the Father they lived in fear of. And the fire; she could never forget the fire. The one that had taken Rose —
She had been meant to run. Even now she could still hear her sister's desperate pleas, but Reverie had been frozen. She could do nothing but watch as the fire consumed everything, and so in her desperation Rose had tried to sing to the flames, to ward them away. Phantom pain simmered in her paws as she recounted the tale, the memory of burns long-healed, but Reverie went on. Everything, she would tell him everything, even as her eyes heated again with tears. Rose had died screaming, writhing, burning alive; she spared Lestan these details, but told him how she had only been able to watch. The flames had touched her too, then, and everything had changed. Her voice fell to a hush as she spoke briefly of the change that had come over her, an unspoken promise in her words that she would tell him more of this.
And when she was found, first by Tybault and then by the rest of her family —
Her parents, furious; her siblings, distraught; herself, lost in a world that was suddenly foreign to her. She told him of how her parents had tried everything to get her to speak, to respond, even just to blink. How they'd screamed at her. Hurt her. That name, over and over and over and over —
She had almost died; unable to eat or drink or sleep of her own accord. She'd wanted to die, but they kept her alive through it all. She spoke of these things with a clinical sort of detachment, moving from the warm tears inspired by thoughts of Rose to something colder and harder. They'd wanted her back, the old her, the one who would care only for their feelings and not at all for her own. They brought healers from far away places, tried herbs and other remedies, horrible things. Once they had almost drowned her. Another time, forced a strange plant into her that left her weeping and seeing flames for hours. Not once did they try to comfort her. Toward the end, her mother had spoken of — giving her away. Reverie shuddered to recall what she'd said; that any man would appreciate a wife as docile as she was then. And so when the fire came again, she ran. Months were lost to her, months she could only assume were spent with Riordan. She came alive in a strange place filled with snow, and was chased from a forest she hadn't understood was claimed.
Then a girl found her in tears and alone, and decided that she would love her. Reverie was still uncertain that she deserved Bjarna's love, but it had changed her life. If not for that meeting, she might have been forgotten in the snow forever. She had met Lestan then, a few days later, and she couldn't help a nervous and slightly tearful smile to remember it. But all too soon she found that it was time to speak of her most guarded secret, her curse, her very nature.
The flower world, what she had once called a garden. She explained what little she remembered in soft tones, uncertainty bleeding into her voice. Before the fire, she had been someone else, just a girl — but then the fire had come, and she was not that girl anymore. A transplant, a sun-spirit sent in a moment of tragedy to fill the space left by it, fated to burn endlessly in a world that did not recognize her. Plagued by small gods and forever chasing a vision of something greater, something that evaded her at every turn.
Yet the memories lingered; the feelings, the hopes, the desires of the girl that was lost to the fire. She was not that girl anymore and yet she was. She remembered more of this world than the one she had come from. The flower world revealed itself to her only in dreams. Sometimes, she saw Lestan in them.
Things are different in the flower world, Reverie finished softly. I - I was… capable there. Powerful, I think. But here - here, I'm just… some girl, except I don't see the world the way everyone else does. But I still remember what it was like to see the world that way. It's all confusing.
It feels like a battle that never ends, She looked away from him then, exhausted with the effort of calling so many horrible memories to mind. For a long time I had forgotten what it was like to feel - hopeful. But then I found you…
And her eyes locked to his again.
When I left The Gilded Sea, I told myself that I would - choose what I wanted, for once. Whatever I wanted, and I wouldn't settle for less. You are what I want, out of everything in the world - in this one and all the others, She would choose him over all of it, everything except perhaps Blossom. I don't quite remember all of it yet, but… I think I loved you long before I ever left the flower world, even. It just took so long to remember anything from - before.

<3!!!

lestan mayfair listened.
the flower world.
the healers.
the pain.
the tears.
the running; the weeping; the agonies; the endlessness of wandering; the love which thrummed in artery and vein and heart and mind.
his eyes had gone first wide to hear, then moistened, then now ran wet with something he had comprehended during the telling of her impossible story — not impossible for him. never for him, and he believed it all, every word! how could he not, how could he not when all reverie had been to him was the most ethereal and purest manifestation of his truest ardent marrow-deep love.
and they had known one another always, and now he wept, half-covering his face but not pulling from her, filled with the desperation of —
knowing.
saltwater ran in rivulets of bittersweetness along his dark face. "riordan asked me if you were getting s-sicker. i said yes."
and that lestan had meant to take her to a healer, a mortal healer, but now that — what flora of this world could work upon magicka of another? "reverie, if you — if you stay, will you get — will your illness worsen?"
because he adored her beyond measure and yet he could not ever ask her to stay in a place not made for her very spirit if she were to lose it in determination to remain. "i love you." paramount, confounded, shivering, "i choose you also. i want you also, but reverie — if you k-keep bleeding you will die. and i can't — i won't —"
was it a greater agony to lose her mortal self than to know she would still live away from him? lestan felt surely it must be.

He knew. Reverie's eyes filled with guilt and grief; she had tried so hard to shield him from this, but perhaps she should have known that it would be for nothing. How could she tell him the truth?
The ugly, bitter, impossible to swallow truth that she had come to accept since that day in the water with Riordan: that this was her own fault.
Riordan had told her nothing, but Reverie had lingered on the encounter for a long while. Eventually the memories started to stir, and she began to connect the dots in her own slow and winding fashion. What could she have done to cause such damage to her body? There were the symptoms to consider, but also the timing of it, which she only vaguely remembered. But she knew that it had started with Blossom. It had started with the daughter whose existence should not have been possible; Reverie was too young to have a child and yet she had, she did, and she had never truly stopped to question that until so very recently. Riordan's words, a background chorus to her slow realization:
Do you have any idea what you've done to yourself?
I love you, She whispered first, touching her nose to Lestan's cheek, her heart breaking to see him so distraught over this. But it - it isn't being here that's making me sick, Lestan. It's... Her touch fell away and her eyes drifted of their own accord, and found Blossom.
I didn't mean to, Reverie said a little dully. I didn't know what I was doing, I think, but I've always thought that - that Blossom has something a little bit magical about her. After I talked to Riordan, I started to remember things. I - I think I hurt myself very badly, when I - with her. I was - well, physically, too young - so it had to be magic. And it's my own fault, Riordan said that. He said that I did this to myself.
I haven't remembered how to fix it yet, but I think I will soon. Riordan knows, but he... he didn't tell me, Her voice turned a little rough with those words, tinged with something adjacent to anger but not quite there. He knows things that he won't tell me. He called me the sundancer. I think he wants to - to make me accept him back into my life, by only telling me a little bit at a time. But I don't want to let him. I want to remember on my own - and then I can fix it.
You must touch divinity.
She found she could not look away from Blossom.

lestan listened, but he was suddenly very tired, and suddenly saddled with a dire guilt as reverie spoke of her true age, and he remembered how he had been caught by the haze of scent and fairy-lights.
and now!
lestan was consumed by shame, choked by it; it snared his tongue and muted her words, though he nodded and kept his eyes upon her face, her perfection, which he had smeared and all but laid desolate with his horrid fleshly desires.
the sundancer.
riordan.
lestan's self-loathing gave way to a harrowing flash of rage, that this stranger should toy with reverie in such a way. "he tells u — you. he tells you everything, o-or he doesn't come with us. and h-he'll never know blossom until i trust him, that's for goddamned true."
reverie's hesitance around riordan turned the man into a scapegoat of perfection for lestan, upon which he might hang the yoke of his rage, the chains of his frustration, and now the shackles of his remorse.
"f-for now, reverie," the mayfair said, at last pulling his eyes from their daughter, "let's rest. you first. i'll keep watch. and in the morning, we can start moving toward saltshore."

She could see how it hurt him, all of it, though Reverie couldn't know that he blamed himself. His sorrow was instead assigned to her own failings: that she knew so little of herself, that she had so little control, that she was so feeble — it all amounted to the simple fact that she was not capable, she was not ready, and she had hurt Lestan with it and besides that brought another into the mess, Blossom, who was innocent in all this.
Reverie didn't want any knowledge of Riordan's, not anymore, but couldn't bear the thought of arguing with Lestan right now. She'd already hurt him so much. She kissed his cheek and pulled him with her as she went back to Blossom, to settle with her. He'll tell us both, Reverie murmured, catching his self-correction. If Riordan wanted any part of her, he would need to find his way into Lestan's good graces too. This was not optional, not to her; she'd never heard Lestan curse before, and it unsettled her deeply.
She kept him close, still plagued by the lingering fear that he would leave her — even now that he knew everything, especially now! Did he understand that she would destroy everything they tried to build? Did he see their future as it truly was?
Sleep took longer to find her this time, and somewhere in the space between, she realized that it didn't matter. They would be okay; they were meant to be with one another, that much was clear to her. What else could keep them together through so many hurts and so much tragedy? As long as they remained so, she felt they could handle anything.