11-20-2019, 12:42 PM
----------------kiss me until i can't speak
She says his name, and an icy finger slides down his spine. Pteron shivers; he hates the way his name sounds on her perfect golden lips. When he stops, she continues to come nearer. Too close for comfort, he thinks; on the other side of Beqanna would still be too close for comfort. It has not always been this way between them; Pteron had once considered her a friend. But then, the bright-eyed pegasus has considered everyone a friend – or at least a potential friend. It had been easy to overlook her cruelty, her possessive nature, her inexplicable rages. Children forgive easily, and a close friendship with the young princess of Loess was encouraged by every important adult in young Pteron’s life. So he considered her a friend, in the way that a burning flame might be a friend – safe, so long as it stayed within the walls of the lantern.
But there are no walls that can contain dragonfire, and that Reia burnt them down should have come as no surprise. Should have, but Pteron is optimistic to a fault. And now, he is well and truly burnt.
Of course it’s yours, Reia tells him, torching the potential escape that another father might have given him. It was too much to hope that there had been others for her, too much to hope that she might have snared another fool as easily as she has snared Pteron. The snarl makes him flinch, but he knows better than to pull away. Reia does not like when he pulls away.
Instead he waits, praying that her anger will fade, praying for a miracle. Looking away from her is usually folly (she likes to strike when his attention is elsewhere) but he risks the fire and the teeth to look at the wide golden belly. Her scales are stretched wide across it already, shielding the unborn child. He imagines he sees a ripple just there, like something within her feels his scrutiny. His child, he thinks, his child and Reia’s. If ever there is a woman who should not be a mother, he thinks it might be the golden dragoness. A feral flame cannot raise a child. She’ll kill it, he thinks.
He visibly blanches at the relief that idea elicits, disgusted by the fact he’d even consider it. He can’t let her kill it. It should not exist, but he cannot leave it alone in her care. She reminds him, satisfaction think in her honey-sweet voice, that it is his, that she is. And he knows it. When his olive gaze meet her gaze, there is acknowledgment there.
This child is his responsibility, and its mother by extension. That is the world they have been raised in, where a child binds a man and woman in marriage as surely as an exchange of vows. And yet…
Pteron’s head begins to shake, slowly at first, and then more firmly.
“No.” He says, taking a step away. “No.” She’s scorched him for that simple word before, burnt the feathers from his wings and made him apologize for disobeying. But he says it anyway, because there are some things that are worth standing up for.
“That might be our child,” he shouldn’t have said might be, Pteron realizes, but it is too late to change that now, “But I am not yours. There is no us. What we have – what we did – is nothing. Mistakes, things I regret. I do not love you.”
@[Reia]
-- pteron --