pastries and paint {merlin x hunter}!blitz

[[nyte]]

h u n t e r . The trees are purple today. Purple like the wringing of my hands, the racing of my heart and the way if feels like it's trapped between two walls slowly crawling toward me. Inevitability, that is purple. To watch disaster approach and to know that I can do nothing but splatter different shades of an anxious color upon tree trunks. I am purple today. Lilacs and violets have dried upon my jeans, hands splattered with their songs as I make my way back to the house with a woven basket and dormant words. I'm so jealous of their sounds. Their voices are intoxicating, they taste like raspberries upon the tip of my tongue. Sometimes they are bitter, not yet ripe snd sour down my broken throat and sometimes they are sweet - as though they have been marinated in sugar and cream. My brother's voice is sweet. At least, I like to think of him as my brother. We share nothing but our last name and I know that it is a flimsy tie to which I cling but I care for them all as though they were my flesh and blood and I can only hope that they feel the same. It's not as if I can ask them, anyway. Instead I live in an ignorance that paints yellow smiles upon my cheeks. I've scrawled the note a thousand times over, tearing out the page and writing a simple sentence over and over again. I keep to myself more often than not- terrified of the words they can so freely throw about. I don't want to be hurt by them and so I surround myself with purple trees who feel the same as me. Have a picnic with me. (: I hand it to Merlin without meeting his eyes, basket I had filled the might before clutched within sweaty palms. I've never been good at this- people talk too fast and too loud for my hands to keep up, pencils break and pens run out of ink but their voices are strong. Smooth and soft like golden silk- voices that will never break nor run dry. The jealousy is green.

table by elegant

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

M E R L I N ;

{ there's an army i'm finding
around your heart }

The occasional constellation could ruin a boy, and Merlin was no stranger to the night. His worst thoughts came about in times like those, when there were no voices and no birds to sing their songs. There was no world for him to gaze at through his window when the sun kissed him goodnight, so he was left with the stars and his thoughts, and his mind was a scary, scary place.

He'd been trying. For them. For Abraham and Jezebel and all of them; he wanted to be better.

Small steps: a bite turned into two, and the visions went away eventually. That was the first thing he had noticed. And, sometimes, the night was not so very fearful.

He slept for what felt like the first night in years, and when he opened his eyes again, he told himself to keep trying. ("Don't give up. You've come this far already.")

Hunter was his brother, for all intents and purposes except that the same woman had not birthed them both. Genetics and scientific reasons and codes, that was all that separated the two boys, one with a voice he was scared to use, and the other with no voice at all. He stood in Merlin's doorway, notepad in his grasp, the ever-present sound of pens scratching against paper.

Have a picnic with me. (:

Merlin smiled. He knew why Hunter and all of the others were so nice to him: because they did not want him to die. Life or death wrapped up in a wicker basket, a chance of redemption on a checkered blanket among a sea of Hunter's painted trees.

"I'd love to," he said, even when the stars begged him not to.

He thought he could hear them then, crying for their lost control of him, but he just kept smiling.