let's start a fire they'll remember, anyone

[Brinly]

She can feel that almost tangible anger as it bubbles inside of him, can almost taste the bitterness of it on his own tongue. She tricks her mind into being satisfied by it, telling herself that was what she had wanted. She wanted him to show that he disliked her; she wanted him to prove every theory she had invented inside of her head. If there is a twinge of disappointment at the way his face twists into a scowl, and the way his words growl from his throat, she is careful to not show it.

Instead, she offers him a nearly invisible smile, faint but glowing on the edges like an ember. “Everyone this deep in the forest is hiding from something,” she says as she watches him carefully through a curtain of tangled forelock.

He doesn’t step away from her, and she takes it as a challenge. She steps closer, then, and even though she could not touch him even if she reached, the heat that radiated from beneath her skin was undeniable. The smolder of her gaze is locked firmly with the storm-gray of his, almost daring him to ask, but then deciding she didn’t want to give him that power. “I burn anything that I touch,” there is an edge to her voice now, and a coolness that betrays the simmering fire under her tongue. “So I hide myself, from everyone.”

She lets the truth settle between them, heavy and uncomfortable like a ragged stone. She withdraws from him then, and this time the way her lips curve is jaded, almost defeated. “Sometimes I wonder what it’s like down here, with the rest of you, but I don’t stay long.” She doesn’t say that it always makes her feel far more empty than she did before. She doesn’t say that the disappointment and self-loathing that fills her up is far stronger than any internal fire she could ever build, and that it takes months for her disheartened acceptance and apathy to return.

B R I N L Y
burn until our lives become the embers

@[brigade]