The taste of urana salad
Author's Notes
Written for the line prompt thread. The prompt: "I've forgotten how (drink/food/candy/etc.) tastes like.."
"What do you miss most?"
Dorian turns in the dimness. "Me?"
Curia smirks back, pulling one foot up onto the drystack. "Who else?"
Beyond their vantage on the wall, ancient insects creak in the night. The barren plains are a dull mirror of the moonlight, sprawled on every side of them.
Dorian could never forget any of this, no matter the years he spends away. He wasn't expecting to return to his homeland so soon—barely two years since he left—but here he is, brought by new duties, the same duties that are soon to take him away.
Yet, already, there is an awkwardness to the way his heart nestles itself here—a subtle foreignness to everything that tells him he will never be a man of Tyse again. Not now, now that he's severed that thread and given it forever to the keeping of the Duchess of Diamonds.
"It would be easier to say what I don't miss," Dorian finally answers, folding his arms as his eyes cross the unchanged stars. "I miss the very scent of the air. The burning of the wind on my skin. The taste of urana leaves."
Curia takes this all in with a thoughtful nod, a mellow smile. "I've forgotten how urana tastes, you know," she replies. "It's always the small things. And you think you could never forget them, how precious they are, but time always comes out the victor. Scrubs everything away, bit by bit."
As Dorian listens and gazes upon the scout commander's face, crow's feet in the corners of her eyes and greying hair in six braids, he feels as if he were seeing the future.
Thirty years surviving. Thirty years on the move. Thirty years carving spaces for herself in worlds she's never known before. That's the life in store for him, and she has already lived it.
"I don't know if it's naive of me to hope," he admits then, glancing down at the sleeping Duchess in the camp. "And I don't know where this journey is taking us...but the next time we meet, wherever that is, we should find you some urana salad."
Curia seems baffled, then amused, almost as if she were shaping a retort on her tongue.
But instead she offers a grin and says, "Yes. I'd like that very much."