you're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. you feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. see, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
She’ll know what it means, someday.
She’ll know what it means to sacrifice.
She’ll know what it means to bleed.
But she does not think to wonder what it means now. Because she is fixated on the way he touches her and what a thrill it is to be touched at all. Her mother has touched her, certainly. Even her father has kissed her downy head and made her the edges of her vision strobe with rage. But he is something strange and magnificent and he is stuck to her in a way that makes her skin crawl in such a delicious way that it both confuses and delights her. Because she does not understand what any of it means. All she knows it that her anger tightens a vise around her throat and she finds some perverse satisfaction in this.
He turns the question on her and she shivers. She remembers how she’d sunk her teeth into her father’s shoulder. She remembers the bitter disappointment when her venom was not enough to take him to her knees. But trying does not count, she knows. Wanting it so badly that it had made her ache does not count. She’ll make good on it someday, she thinks. She’ll destroy him for thinking himself worthy of her mother.
“No,” she says and she feels no shame, no embarrassment. One day, she will. And this knowledge is enough to buoy her.
He turns his gaze toward the horizon and she follows, pulls back her lip to drag her teeth along the curve of his shoulder. “Ghaul,” she murmurs because he has not told her his name. Because his mother sacrificed herself for him and maybe he doesn’t have one at all. “Ghaul,” she says again, with more conviction, and she giggles.
And then plunges herself into a stony silence at the sound of bodies crashing through the darkness. Her vision shifts instinctively and she turns her head in the direction of the sound, watching on bated breath as the figures approach. A hiss gathers on her tongue and she sinks even closer still into Ghaul’s side, teeth bared.
