isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She cannot relate to the way that he seethes, but she wishes she could.
Countless hours have been spent watching the rest of them and memorizing the different ways their faces changed, and learning to match the expressions to the emotions they were feeling. Maybe that is why she reads him so well; because she is practicing nearly since she was born, from the moment she realized she didn’t belong and that she was not like the rest of them. But of course, there are still many things she doesn’t understand. Such as she does not recognize that when he closes his eyes and inhales that he is trying to steady his anger; she doesn’t know that sometimes their emotions can be too much, that the intensity can swell so that they might feel like bursting with it.
Of all the emotions, anger is what intrigues her the most – far more than happiness or love or even hate. She hears him snap at her, and she wonders what it might be like, for her voice to turn sharp like a sword, for heat to blossom in her chest. She wonders what it might be like to feel so impassioned that her eyes spark and her body runs hot, rather than the steady coolness she always feels.
As it is, even beneath the wave of his fury, her eyes maintain their impersonal flatness. She watches him silently, almost studiously, unflinching beneath the way he seemingly critiques her. He appears to be looking for something, and she assumes he is trying to place why she was different. She has learned now that the captive star gives off a vibe – unsettling to some, being a thing that they just can’t quite place, while it calls to others; others that held an affinity to the stars and other cosmic things. “I was a star, once. But I was reborn like this,” she offers him plainly, making it impossible to tell how the notion of being forced into mortality made her feel.
And that, truthfully, was the whole of it.
She felt nothing.
“My name is Islas,” she answers him, unfazed by the sarcasm that bites in his tone. It does not occur to her to ask for his name, and so she doesn’t.
@[Set]