promptfic: uldren/jolyon, pillow fort

[sword_logic]

The rain falls and rises and flows eastwest northsouth, and Jolyon feels each drop roll off the soft thick foliage and onto his skin, under his neckline, tracing veins that run down his wrist and under his glove. He shrinks away from the electric heat. Uldren tips his face up and lets it course over him.

“It’s cold,” Uldren murmurs, even as thick, steaming mist rises from the sweet fetid flora that carpets the ground. Jolyon wants to wrap it around his shoulders, pull it up over them both. Wants to hide from this great living beast that breathes against them.

“So come here,” he says, and Uldren’s eyes glimmer in the soft light that shines from everywhere and nowhere.

Time slips through his fingers like sand or water here. All he knows is they’ve been resting long enough for the blood to start running torpid through their veins. The Garden welcomes their rest, folds them in like the softest bed, small flowers blooming against them that whisper like silk.

He doesn’t know whether Uldren crawls up against him immediately or in fifty years or three centuries ago, but he’s warm, warmer than he’s got any right to be, and Jolyon doesn’t miss his cloak anymore. The soft waxed canvas hangs above them as the Garden grows soft cushions around them, grows blankets of knitted leaves and flowers that spell poems in languages he can’t read, and Uldren’s corpse-cold hand brushes drops of scalding rain off of his cheek.

Everything grows here, Jolyon thinks, and looks down at the Prince pressed close against his chest, heart pounding painfully against ribs too small to contain it.