In his head he is brave enough to say it: gods, you are beautiful in the moonlight. He is. He has made Nico weak in the knees since they were fifteen and new and fragile as spun glass, and he does now. In the moonlight his radiance is much subtler; he is opal and pearl and quartz, he is shining and multifaceted.
Instead he traces the bob of Will’s throat, his long, freckly neck, cratered with burn scars and cupped with a raised white scar from years of endless picking; follows the wild winding wisps of his hair, barely held back by his old sunglasses, compressed in coils around his head like a pen spring squished to the size of its threads, creaking with the weight of its own potential energy, brimming with the imagined burst of its future; memorizes the fluttering flap of his feathering eyelashes, the delicate dips of his deepened Cupid’s bow, the roughened raze of his wide rowdy hands. All of him is in motion, always, but now especially, hands twitching on the wheel, head thrown back, mouth wide and shaking along with his shoulders.
“I really like your laugh,” and it’s quick, vowels tumbling over each other and tripping the consonants, a queue of clumsy hopefuls scrambling over shoulders and clasping hands. The pretty laughter fades and arched eyebrows replace it, poorly hidden surprise, twitching smile lines, and Nico looks deliberately forward, mortification cackling along each of his wire-tense muscles, dancing along the shimmering heat of his face. “It’s. Wide.”
“Wide?” asks Will carefully, craning his neck to glance in his blind spot, whispering chuckles dancing along to the beat of the blinker.
“Wide,” Nico confirms, flicking out his hands. His fingers are not nearly as long, nor as wiry or corded, but the scarring is mirrored. Nicks and scratches and burn marks and calluses, topographic maps of time spent.
Will’s turn is successful — the strawberry baskets dip dangerously from their precarious perch on backseats, but don’t fall, shifting over and around each other to burst tiny globules of stretched taut flesh, rubbing against rough reed ribbons. Nico inhales deeply, and the sweet is almost nauseating, summer fruit twisting in the air along with lavender body wash and Blistex and Texas summer sun.
“You take up space.”
“My laugh?”
Laughter in his words in his hands in his skin, in his eyes, in the coils of his hair, in his grass-stained heels, in the bends of his scar-bleached knees. In the dancing dots of his face arms chest legs. In the dip of his bottom lip, crater under his too-big front teeth. In the jut of his crooked spine and wide hips.
“What about my laugh?”
It is in his words more often than not and in Nico’s dreams even more so. It curls around the blurry edges of his dreams and weaves into daisy-strong chains, dangling from the too-high ceilings of his nightmares, coiling around his arms and chest and back and yanking with the force of breaking ribs, the force of bellows, the force of clasped bloodless hands. Dragging him across trench gouged ground to bright light and clear air and the distant memory of summer rain.
“That you like, I mean.”
“It’s snorting,” Nico confesses. Will reddens, and Nico smiles, under the heat of it grows sunflower and dandelion and tinted brown-eyes Susans. “Um. Loud.”
“Geez,” Will grumbles, “tell a guy the truth, why don’t you.”
Nico has never seen gold under silver nightlight and it fascinates him, how Will sparks and shimmers, how when the sun sets it does not fade away. How the tiny specks of precious metal weave through him like tinsel and glow in veins of sweet summer memory; how the warm night billows and blows around him lovingly, how the breeze from the open window greets him like a precious grandchild, a beloved nephew. Seedchild; beloved of the earth and sun, performer under the moon, the stars.
Will’s wide hands inch across the dash, brushing over the ancient radio dials and dipping over the skipping cassette, pausing by the base of the gearshift and resting, limply, palm open, fingers cracked and spread. Knuckles popping and chittering amongst themselves, hiding in the bent hoods of wrinkled skin. Nico lowers his heavy hands on the heated hopeful hesitance, curling his cool fingers around much longer ones, and squeezing, once, twice, thrice.
“I like your laugh,” he repeats. He rolls his shoulders, hands flexing, twitching, pulling.
Will’s hand tightens. The road opens up and the Atlantic glimmers beside them, moon whispering to its rippling waves, and he smiles, grins, wider than before, and he is laughing, again, and it is wider even this time, as wide as the sparkling silver water.
“I hear you.”
He squeezes.
You are beautiful in the moonlight. You are beautiful all the time.
Nico squeezes back.
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The feeling of butterflies 🦋💕 - my piece for the @unfoldingmelodyzine, a kapollo charity zine
Also please check out the fic, of metamorphosis and butterflies by cosmicpoet on ao3
IDs in alt texts. More deets & a breakdown under the cut! ^^
This zine also offered a separate, behind the scenes breakdown of pieces; so you can see my thoughts & step-by-step process here!
It was a real honor to be a part of this project, as well as collab with Gabe on this very romantic scene for klapollo; we even made a playlist together (which u can enjoy)! There are so many things about this work that really pushed my skills and made me really proud of it, but i have to say… my favorite detail is the butterflies! If you can find all 29, then bravo!
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Wake up babe, new WolfWren-Redemption Fic just dropped:
Exile [Canon-Continuation/WolfWren/Slow Burn/Redemption Arc]
Chapter 1 of (???oh god help us)
Inspired by @somewillwin's Bounty Hunter Shin concept, because I am very very weak:
[Summary] After escaping Peridea together, Sabine sends Shin into hiding until the danger from Thrawn & the New Republic passes. Three years later, the shadow-war with Thrawn drags on, and Sabine searches for Shin in vain, desperate to know she's okay, and desperate to pick up where they left off.
"Sabine scanned the people around her, searching for a flash of platinum blonde, reaching out for a familiar force signature. The habit was too ingrained. It had been almost a year since she’d consciously given up on ever finding Shin. She wondered how long it would take before every part of her finally gave up."
"Shin wondered just how much pain one person could take. And if, one day, she would have suffered enough to make up for all the pain she’d inflicted on others- and if she could bear it, until then. All she knew is that she would never, ever let someone get close enough to hurt her ever again."
Read on Ao3
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