She thinks she knows him, but she doesn’t.
She couldn’t possibly.
To know him would be to have seen the hazel growing aslant a meadow river, and the vivisection that ran the waters there red with blood. To know him would be to know the way his twin sister looked when he saw her for the last time that he dared to, bound and bled, smiling. If she knew him, then she would know the way his golden mother’s bones looked underwater, and how his silver mother bound herself with lightning; a cage of her own making. Instead, she knows what he allows her to see; someone petulant at times, arrogant and cruel at others - but always someone who doesn’t need anyone else.
So, when she asks him:
“Where?”
And then, just as quickly, says:
“Yes. Wherever, that doesn’t matter.”
He answers, “As you wish,” with a steely smile that suggests she really ought to have specified. He could bring her somewhere terrible; unravel her again with her own history - peel back her flesh and learn what lies underneath. And going in he did consider it, but her willingness to participate in his schedule of events for the day has left him in a more generous mood. It’s the simplicity in the transaction that thrills him; the power behind gifting that which the giftee could not possibly hope to afford that sends the hot prickle of adrenaline barrelling down the ridges of his spine.
Luckily for her, he has decided to show her something beautiful. He doesn’t realize it’s because there is more to him than he would prefer to believe.
Because he would prefer to believe he didn’t linger on the lightning.
Or that he didn’t hear repeated a thousand times when he closed his eyes, the words: “Are you alone?”
And she won’t know this either, but when he moves to touch her (and he must, to travel in the way that he does) he is unconsciously careful to avoid her scars and so he swings his head forwards, slowly, and touches her chest with the end of his nose.
Then everything disappears.
When the world comes together again it is not the same, in fact, it’s not the world they’ve left at all. One of his favourite haunts, the sky is lilac like the petals of wild waterleaf, and it melts into a haze of blush where wisps of feather-white clouds strain out all of the colour and pour them like paints into the rippled reflections of a glassy lake that seems in these moments more like a mirror. It’s midnight, and behind them a curling mountain peak reaches out into the sky and threatens to pull it down into everything else - until snow, and rock, and water, and the two of them, are all one thing. It’s beautiful, and a far cry from the meadow’s winter thunderstorm.
“That’s better,” he says, breaking their contact and sounding blasé enough despite the expression on his face that reads otherwise. These first moments were always his favourite, when their eyes grew wide with wonder, when they thought him a God. He doesn’t care that he tangles threads of time and space each time his heart hurts and he feels the need to forge facades of his own self-worth for the rest of the world. He doesn’t put that much thought into anything besides himself for long enough to notice.
“Now,” he says,
“Where were we?”
ELEKTRUM
how time twines around your neck,
@Lepis