u/BetweenTemperatures

image #2

The light of the moon falls across each flower. It touches each curving surface of each petal. They watch the moon. Leander watches the moon.

Mist drifts across the grass and settles on flesh colored blooms. Moisture collects, and runs down to the center of each flower. Leander drinks.

A fawn's footfall ripples through the earth, and Leander feels it.

The flowers receive the scent of damp earth, and Leander tries to remember what that smelled like when he was a human. Before he was consigned to this undead life…waiting amongst the flowers for the light of a full moon, and the love of his life; Marguerite.

The translation of his body is nearly complete now. Perhaps soon...he will be allowed to escape this arrestment.

The flowers whisper to him. Hurried footsteps. Grass dragging against a nightgown. There is an urgency about her movement this night.

Though Leander has no breath to hold, the flowers sit in anticipation of her voice…her touch.

Her footsteps approach the edge of the flowers and she kneels there. He feels her breath on the petals of one particular flower and she takes it delicately in both hands. She holds the heavy bloom…caresses it with her fingers.

Bergamot over warm, bare skin beneath a damp nightgown. The flowers tell him everything. Her bare toes digging into the soil.

"Leander, my love…show yourself." At the sound of her, each flower begins to slowly upright itself along its vine, and turn its open petals towards her. Leander and his flowers long for her.

"Your accompaniment never ceases to amaze me, dear Leander." He hears the smile in her voice, but would she love him yet?

The question lingers as his remaining hand parts the earth and rises from among the flowers. Not living, but not dead either. He feels the moist air condense along his arm and fingertips.

She gasps and laughs — bright and surprised — as she carefully steps through the flowers toward his outstretched hand. She clasps both hands around his and kisses him. With no eyes to wet with tears, the flowers around her begin to droop.

"Do not despair, my love." She holds one flower in her hand. Her touch brings some life back into it immediately. Strengthened by her warmth. By her life. She guides his hand up to her face.

"You are forever mine, even now."

His hand melts at the touch of her face. He feels the smile on her lips and her cheeks as she runs her fingers along the edges of the flower petals.

"You would not believe the face my father made today when I told him I still love you." She takes a deep breath, her voice beginning to quiver. "Truly, we share something he is unable to understand."

She sits with him in silence, and the flowers wait. They wait for the tears welling up in her eyes to fall.

"Even still — our love endures." She manages.

"I don't regret any second of it. I don't!" Her voice carries through the cool night air.

He feels her shape change…as her anger erupts — "That monstrous woman! She lied to us…lied to me…she promised she could heal you! My father would not hear my story. When I demanded we report her he refused."

“I am not…I am not lachrymose by nature, Leander. You know this.”

Her tears begin to drip against his hand.

"This dilemma confounds me, my dear Leander. If she hadn't cursed you…would you have succumbed months ago? Every moment since then, our love under each full moon, gone?" She embraces his arm now with both hands…presses it against her bosom.

"It pains me to say it...but this time we've been given is a gift, and I intend to be present for every kiss…every…communion." Their proximity gives him clarity even without the flowers at attention. He feels her heart beating against his arm, and feels the warmth of her.

"And — I know that you feel the same. Though I see less of you beneath the light of each full moon…your resolve to love me yet never falters. You are strong…and somehow…in this state your prowess remains." Against his hand…her cheek grows warm.

She sits in silence, her chest heaving slowly against him. He waits. The flowers wait.

His thumb traces a gentle line along her bottom lip, and it quivers. The soft fullness of her lips is enough to awaken the remnants of his body that remain. He yearns for her, and the flowers rise to the beat of an undead heartbeat.

Her breath catches, and she exhales with a whimper before taking his thumb into her wet mouth. He feels her tongue and her lips. Her bare legs beneath her gown begin to press back and forth against the earth, and he feels it. Feels where her moisture and warmth meet his collective new body within the earth.

He has felt it building across many moons — her love not mourning his transformation but accelerating it, as though devotion itself were the mechanism the curse always required.

As she reaches beneath her legs he presses a flower against her…

"Leander I yearn for you…"

His hand feels more distant now. He feels the change.

"Put your hands upon me as before…"

His fingers slip past her cheek and graze her collarbone.

"A fire burns within me…" and then breathlessly "truly, an unbearable heat…"

His hand claws at her breast…an attempt to hold it one last time. He tears the strap from her gown and his fingertips claw at her exposed breast before slipping down further still…

"Leander…?" A question.

He feels her hands clutch at his a moment before his fingers slide beneath the soil.

"Wait..!" She claws at the earth. "Return at once, Leander!"

The flowers watch her. Leander watches her. Her bare legs against the soil. Her scent drifting through the air. Her gown amongst petals and vines.

"No..no…no!" She sobs. Beating the forest floor where his hand was last seen.

"Return to me…"

The flowers watch her as she holds her face in her hands. A tear runs over her exposed breast. It drips from her nipple before falling to the earth.

The flowers drink. Leander tastes it.

Her eyes are closed as the flowers, still rising to the undead heartbeat, surround her.

She takes a deep breath and opens her wet, red eyes to see the flowers surrounding her. Leander leans in to press petals against her wet face, to caress her cheek once again.

Her eyes distant now, she recalls the incantation…"She who has sustained him through devotion…"

A flower presses against her neck.

"…shall, in receiving him wholly unto herself, restore what was sundered."

Leander raises a vine that cups the line where the weight of her bare breast rests against her body.

"Show me…Leander. Show me." Her voice shakes.

His vine continues around her breast, across her collarbone, and up the side of her face. He reaches up and draws himself across her bottom lip. Still supple, though wetter than before. Tears fall down her cheeks as he embraces her. With the tip of his vine he wipes the moisture from her face and presents it to her lips. She takes him inside her mouth and drinks it. He drinks from her, and tightens his hold around her breast.

"Oh..." He feels her voice in his length across her stomach, feels it across her neck, and in her lips as they press against the stem of him.

"I am not afraid of what you have become. Give me what you are able to give."

From the earth he brings forth a vine, purposeful and warm. Beneath her gown he presents himself and waits for her consent in this new communion.

She turns to a rising flower next to her and presses it against her cheek. Leander feels each fingertip, the moisture on her skin, and the heat below it as she begins to move her body against his offering from within the earth.

"Sustain me."

He moves to her entrance and feels the anticipation of her body. Her hearth within burns with a fire that he can feel and yearns toward.

With vines he slides beneath her gown and around her thighs, beneath her hips. They press against her neck and behind her head, into her hair. He wraps around each of her forearms, and her wanting grip holds each of them.

"Cross my threshold, dear Lea—" the flowers around her shudder as he enters her, and she gasps against the vine at her lips. Her hands tighten around him and they embrace each other as they share the sensation. He can taste her body, and the tension it holds for him.

He has made her wait long enough.

In concert he begins to move within and around her body, pushing and pulling and tightening and loosening. Her back arches against the binding vines and her open mouth closes to swallow.

His vine curls and she responds with a turn of her hips. Her breathing is heavier now, and shudders as he twists her wet nipple and tightens playfully around her neck.

He surrounds her completely. This is what he has become — not less than he was. More.

Steadily he takes her to the edge. He feels her body warming, the perspiration, muscles pressing against him. He holds her inside and out from every direction, with more hands than he ever had as a man.

"My fire — still burns, Leander. Fuel it."

He feels her body contract once around him and his response reverberates through vines and flowers alike. Tightening, pulsing, pulling. He summons more vines to join their union.

"Open every door…."

He crosses a second threshold beneath and inside her. He begins to alternate pressure and release at adjacent entrances. Her knuckles grow white, and the tension within his vines brings him closer to his own blooming.

"every — window…" her toes curl against his earth.

He gently turns her head to face a new extension of himself, waiting. She closes her eyes as he gently opens her mouth with a thin vine, and she takes him inside. First through her lips, then into her throat. Her lips around him, her tongue against him. The flowers flutter and sigh around her as she moves at various depth and pressure.

Her breath comes out in shudders against his length inside her mouth, and her entrances below contract around him. Her body arches backwards and stretches vines that sprout buds along their length to the pulsating rhythm of her release.

She says his name between occupied lips as her body releases moisture below. What she gives reaches him below in slow warm waves — through root and stem and earth itself — and he draws it in the way he draws in the dew, the way he draws in her tears, the way he has drawn in every part of her she has ever given the ground. He holds it. He holds her. The flowers drink and he is the flowers and he is drinking her and she is still saying his name.

One final contraction and she cries out into the night air. Every petal feels, every bud blooms.

He holds her and watches her breathe. Feels her chest rising and falling, her heartbeat against him settling. New flowers along him gently caress her skin, and raise gooseflesh against his petals.

He pulls away from her mouth and holds her face as she presses her brow against him. He gently lays her back against a hammock of vines and flowers. She smiles as he slowly plays with her bottom lip.

"…Receiving him wholly into herself…" she whispers.

They sit in silence together as insects in the night air provide ambience. He draws a slow circle around her warm breast.

Leander Vael, whose body was lost, now reborn in love.

Restored.