Brinly
If anyone had asked her, she does not think she would have denied loving Brazen. Even being a creature never designed or destined for love she still knew it when it was in her chest, because it burned just like everything else—it hurt and made her want to pull away, just like her touch makes everyone else pull away.
She also would not have denied that she left, because it is one of the only things she knows how to do. To shutter herself away and to hide, with the idea that she is saving someone from herself, when in reality that is only half of it. She wants to save herself. She wants to protect the last remaining piece of strength that she has, that final stone that has not yet crumbled beneath the weight of rejection and loss and a dreamed future that can never come true.
Perhaps she is selfish in this way, or it’s a feral part of her that thinks only of how to survive, but she is not sure if she will ever learn to put anyone before herself because of it.
She does not move away from him when he steps closer, though her jaw does clench, her teeth grinding slightly with the effort it takes to not react. She does not want to hear any of the things that he is telling her, does not want him to give a voice to all of these things she never wanted to be confirmed. Of course this is Brazen’s son. Of course, because why would Brazen wait for the girl that was never going to come back?
But he says that she is dead, and whatever flashes in her eyes is quickly smothered. Her spine goes rigid, her face suddenly smoothing away any and all emotion, because this was not something she was willing to share with him. Her grief instead twists itself into the only emotion she knows, and she sends it directly back to him.
“Did she want you?” The question is blunt, and the emotion fueling the heat in her words could easily be misconstrued as accusatory. In reality, she is thinking of her own child, the daughter she had never asked for from a man she would have never in any lifetime willingly slept with. To think that Brazen had died birthing a child bestowed upon her unwillingly is enough for the heat beneath her skin to catch fire if only it could find the oxygen to do so, but instead all she can settle for is pinning the boy with her simmering stare, awaiting answers she didn’t want to hear.
— if i’m on fire, you’ll be made of ashes too —
@Reave