‘You’re not strange.’ He tells her, and her brow would have furrowed if it were not locked in place by the plate of white bone all red and rust at the edges. As it is, she is almost completely still as those soft teal eyes lift to explore every inch of his face, searching for some kind of warmth in the kindness of his words. But he is so still and so quiet, as stoic as the mountain that lays curled and quiet around the volcano above, always watching and never anything more. He is stone, she thinks again, stone and strong and beautiful. Still though, even without the softening at the edges of those brown eyes or the quirk of a smile at the corners of his stern, beautiful mouth, she feels comforted.
He says it with such truth, such decisiveness, and it is such a beautiful thing to believe.
So she does, will try, for as long as those dark eyes claim the hard valleys and deep hollows of her face. For as long as he keeps her mind from sinking back into the reality of the world they both live in. A world with rules he seems to reject.
His eyes track something moving across her brow and in an instant she feels so small again so unsure, because she knows it must be blood tracing new tracks across her pale face. Are you sure? She wants to ask, wants to close her eyes and disappear from him, from this, from a string of moments that have made it so much easier to breathe for the first time in so long. Do you still think i’m not strange? The words may be written across her face in the ink of sad eyes and the way she turns her face from him so slightly, but they do not take shape on her tongue, will never survive past the safety of her pale, perfect lips.
Then he says her name again, and in that voice that makes something wild and treacherous yearn so deeply inside her belly. She thinks of his lips again, of how close they had come to the crest of stained bone, to the weeping wounds drawn in red ink, to the flat copper of her skin. She thinks of how only his breath had reached her, how it was soft and warm and she could have stayed frozen in that moment forever without growing weary of the sameness.
She wonders if anyone will ever be able to bring themselves to touch her, to taste the metallic tang of her blood as it dries on their lips. She is sure it will not be anyone like him. So quiet and stoic, her favorite shade of storm grey and with wings that make her skin feel tight and electric with such innocent, curious yearning.
‘You are not one of them.’ He says, he smiles, and she can feel the moment something shifts in her chest, the moment something shatters into pieces too small to catch, too impossible to put back together. That smile makes her reckless, makes her brave and stupid and so foolish as she takes another step closer, easing toward his shoulder with that delicate bone-crowned head bowed in such gentle submission.
Something unfamiliar looms inside her, longs to be accepted by him, by this strange, dark man who keeps his smiles saved for the moments where they will be so deafening. This man who says all the right things, all the things such a gentle heart needs to hear - this man who can look at her without disgust, without revulsion, can call her by her name and tell her she is not a terrible thing.
Her breath goes unsteady, fighting the tremor in her chest as she turns her nose to him, angled so carefully so that the bramble of her antlers won’t scrape the grey. She doesn’t know what she’s doing anymore, doesn’t know what it is she thinks she wants or might find in this stoic stranger, or if maybe she is just so desperately afraid to blink and find him gone. She’s so close, so close, breathing soft and unevenly against the skin behind his foreleg, wanting to reach out and feel the warmth of his realness. Wanting to prove that she is not insane, that this is not a fever dream from plague addled sleep. That there is someone who bothered to notice her beyond the armor that entombs her.
But she is not brave and she is not bold, and even that smile is not enough to change who she is. She doesn’t touch him, doesn’t close those last few inches of distance where she had crept in so close, so soft. She merely keeps her head low and her eyes closed, and whispers, “Nightlock,” a pause as she smiles softly at the way his name feels in her mouth and brushing past her whiskered lips, “will you tell me a story about a terrible thing?”
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love