Anyone;

[Castile]

and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left
a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was

It was only a matter of time until she found him, confronted him. Will she be angry? The question surfaced once or twice before drifting to the bottom of his thoughts to decay and fade from memory.

What he didn’t expect was her approach immediately following his return from the war when his muscles are screaming from the exertion. Dried blood flakes away when his head turns to look at her with narrowed eyes. Even now, his mind buzzes as it teeters between exhaustion and adrenaline. A flickering thought considers abandoning her here on the hilltop, but Cress poses a question that is far too tantalizing to go unanswered.

Despite the grime on his face and the wounds crisscrossing his body, Castile adopts a smug, boyish grin. The answer sits on his tongue for a long moment as he carefully traces her own face up to where she has no ears, then down her neck, before meeting her eyes again. ”I wasn’t done with you,” he murmurs with a nonchalant shrug, ”and I find you intriguing.” That much is true. It’s more of her life’s experiences blended together that fascinate him and how it has constructed someone so fierce yet so uncertain of her place in this small world.

”It hurts my feelings how eager you seemed to run away. Here I thought we had a great conversation.” An airy chuckle slips past his lips then, accommodated by a residual exhalation of smoke that had been swirling in his lungs. ”You don’t know where you want to be,” a step closer brings him within reach as their eyes connect, ”and Loess has treated you rather kindly I would say.” The muscles of his jaw clench as a brow lifts curiously. ”Is being here, in my company, so terrible?” And it would’ve been uncomfortable to hurt her in the destruction of Tephra, no?

castile