[private] the scum of it, stave

[gospel]

She has neither the want nor the energy to dredge up even an iota of irritation.
The answer is simple. But so too was the question, she thinks.

The magic is his and perhaps, were he not capable of tightening a noose around the delicate windpipe and squeezing hard, she might have rolled her eyes. A cruel thing, she might have scoffed, fashioned up a flippant remark. No shit, she might have said. But, while she had delighted in how near he’d brought her face to face with her mortality, she does not wish to invite it back just yet and she keeps her mouth sewn up tight.

He turns away his gaze and she studies him quite intently. As if she might dissemble him with the sharp edge of her gaze alone. As if she might get to the root of it simply by committing to memory the shapes of the galaxies painted on his skin. And yet.

And yet, he remains a mystery even as he summons the remains of something long dead. They spring from the earth in a way that might have startled her were she not still nursing an exhaustion so deep that it had deadened her capacity for shock. Instead, she merely eyes it, her vicious mouth curling around an impish grin.

What a strange magic, she thinks. She clicks her teeth and tilts her fine head and shifts her focus back to the stranger’s handsome face. Something pools in her throat, something hot and sweet. It is not the blood but something else entirely, something she does not yet have a name for.

“Is that a promise?” she asks without flirtation. She is not a coy thing, Gospel. So, she studies him with a passive expression before she turns her attention back to the dead thing staring back at her, unblinking.

these violent delights have violent ends

g o s p e l,

[stave]

— I'm not here looking for absolution —

In some odd way, he supposes that she is an even match for him.

She is not as sweet as his sister—not as precious to him, although he would never admit such things—and not as powerful as him—although no one is, to him at least. But there is something that echoes back at him in the delight in her eyes at the prospect of death, something of her hunger that he recognizes as his own. It is enough to keep him from pulling on the threads of her life again. Enough to keep her around.

His deadened eyes sweep to the fangs at her lips and linger, wondering at the poison that must drip from them, at the wondrous, slow death that she must inflict. Would it hurt more than his own brand? Would he feel it slip through his veins? It is a fascinating proposal and he considers asking to try—just a sip of the toxins—but refrains, refusing to ask for anything. Refusing to be anything but the giver of death.

“I don’t promise anything,” he says with a cold smile, but he finds himself warming to her in a strange way, content to know that she has been one of the first to experience his gift and appreciate it. “But if you find me tomorrow, perhaps we will see.” There’s a whisper of something that shadows his lips but it never quite lands and without any further explanation, he begins to turn away, slipping back into the shadows.

STAVE