I'm at the edge of the forest, looking out. Behind me Loess rises, its mountains and stony trails all covered in greenery. Before me I can make out the sandstone formations that Pangea boasts. A hundred shades of tan make up the kingdom, as dry as snakeskin. Not to my liking at all.
I'd grown rather fond of Loess' hot springs, the warm water seeping between my scales and working all tension from my muscled shoulders where leg and wing bound themselves. Still. Pangea had it's own attractions. The dark creatures that were rumored to live within its labyrinthine washes and gullies. The magic of it's queen. All very interesting, and I could only wonder at the truth of these claims.
Maybe, just a little, I would step inside. Dare myself to explore. It was an idle thought as I grazed the tips of low hanging branches, boredom growing. If there were such violent monsters in the land, I played with the idea of meeting them. Would I be a match for such things? It could be fun to find out. I found my path taking me to the very edge of the trees.
If there was anything out there, it was keeping quiet. No many headed creatures prowled the landscape, no razor toothed vermin scuttled across the stones. My wings resettled, disappointed. This was boring, and I figured I should probably admit it was all nonsense and head home before much longer.
@[draco]
you, dark and glorious, are enough
Draco has found that recently it is hard to leave Dove’s side, though there are a few hours some days that he slips away. Even still, she hangs heavy in his mind, vulnerable navy eyes so clear when he imagines them. He thinks he sees them in the shadows of the Forest, but he is not so foolish as to blur reality and fantasy.
Separating from her for now is for the best, right? He does wonder, wonders about the obsession and darkness that roils in his chest. The voice that whispers he needs to lock her up while he is away to ensure she can never leave. This sense of abandonment drags like chains wrapped around his hocks. She wouldn’t leave him, right? Just the idea of it leaves a bitter and angry taste in his mouth.
The questions of another brush against Draco’s consciousness. He perks his ears in interest and lifts his nose to the breeze to see where such a delicious creature might be hiding. All thoughts of Dove abandoning him leave when he spots the pink fish amongst the low-hanging branches.
“You look like you’re sitting on the edge of a precipice,” the demon calls, allowing just the faintest glow of fear in his eyes. “I like the pink.” He doesn’t think he actually does but . . . he can’t stop himself from saying it.
@[Rebelle]
 hitch a ride on my violence
How often does that happen? You're just about to give up on something and then Bam! It happens. Or close enough, anyway. That was how nature decided to play it today, when the weirdo walked up on me. A black and silver stud with the most unusual set of crimson horns on his head. He's almost as weird looking as I am.
I snorted with a bark of laughter at his blunt entrance, a bored smile on my lips. The harsh sound became something a little more sincere at his next statement, a sharp, breaking-glass sound. "No. You don't." I rebutted, a flat denial. No one likes the pink, not even me, but it didn't really matter. I liked to think of myself as a toxic butterfly, or the little frogs that were as brightly colored as flowers but would make your skin go numb if they touched you.
It's a warning sign.
"It's sweet of you to lie." I allowed, teeth flashing in an enigmatic grin. He was pushing something inside me, making me want to push back. My vividly feathered wings snapped open and shut in quick succession, a few flecks of down shedding from the inner lining. It's a shrug, of sorts, but with a violent flare.
Behind us, the forest stretches. Ahead, the sandstone terraces of Pangea. My tongue clicked against the roof of my mouth a couple of times, before I nodded away from us. "You live there? Or are you a stranger to these parts?" My nose wrinkled with amusement. A strange little stranger, and though he wasn't the kind of warped creature I'd been expecting to see in Pangea, he'd have to do.
@[draco]
you, dark and glorious, are enough
“I don’t?” Draco coos teasingly, briefly wondering if the pink woman before him can also read minds. He mostly disregards the thought, though, since he is certain her words would be far more poisonous if she had any idea what is looping through his mind.
What an interesting grin, the demon thinks as Rebelle flashes what might be intimidating teeth if he knew they are poisonous. In another life Draco might have found himself instantly attracted to Belle and her endless amounts of vitriol. He certainly takes pleasure in the macabre and the cruel, but the gentility of his sister clouds his mind. Growing up with her hardly affected his world view, but now—now, they are growing up and all is not so black and white.
Perhaps that is why Draco grows angry when Belle mentions Pangea. His sister’s meekness makes him weak, this he knows by the way he wants to gush about how he lives here because his father left him here (because he hopes Litotes will come back for him).
A crimson glow emanates from Draco’s eyes when he turns to find Rebelle’s. He can’t help the fear aura now, but even if he could, he does not think he would control it.
“Yeah, I live here. I have my whole life. Why? You interested?” The last three words come out as a snap, disbelief that anyone might want to find a home in Pangea’s boring red clay. “You’d fit in.” He wants to add how he can see her thoughts, and the only reason he thinks she will fit in is that she is just as cold and cruel and mundane as the rest.
Blood builds in his mouth when Draco bites his tongue, though. That vicious anger he feels inside won’t be taken out on a stranger, at least not yet.
@[Rebelle]
hitch a ride on my violence
He contradicts me in a silky voice, and the only response I deign to give is the skyward rolling of my eyes. Flattery was a fake sort of interaction, and while it had its uses, I didn't enjoy it being used on myself.
It has all been fun and games up to the point I mention the desolate kingdom we look over. This seemed to flick something volatile within the spangled stallion, and his mask of friendliness slipped a shade or two. Suddenly he's angry. And what is anger but a shield on harder feelings?
I hadn't noticed before now, but the dark fellow's eyes are red. Not the red of sleeplessness, or bloodshot dry irritation, but a true, vibrant crimson that seems to glow from within. It's a subtle enough thing, but it makes the primal center of my brain flash with warning. He's dangerous, and I should be afraid. I am afraid.
This is no new feeling for me. Fear saturated me from the day I was born. It was all I had known until I'd escaped my mother's clutches and had made my own way in thev world. Then the fear had gotten more abstract. Instead of direct, targeted harm, now it was simply the fear of hunger, of cold, of sharp toothed predators in the night that clung to me. It was almost a relief.
Now though, that old fear resurfaced. The certainty that I was facing someone who would strike me with no remorse or sentiment, only for the joy of causing others pain. It was the kind of fear that brought out the worst in me.
A cold, arrogant stubbornness gripped my bones. The determination to survive and more; to give back every ounce of hate that had been dished out to me. Disdain dripped from my tongue. "Not hardly. If you're a good example of the kind of horse that lives there? I think I'd be bored to tears within the week." Fear makes me mean. I will never admit it, especially not to myself, but I'm afraid of a great many things.
When I see the gleam of dark red blood along the tight line of his lips, my fear is put aside for curiosity's sake. Is he so angry that he draws his own blood? It's tempting to push him back, to see exactly how much it would take to drive him to explosion. I can feel it throbbing in the air between us. The dare of who can hold onto their temper the longest, or who can take the most damage without breaking stride.
I wonder what exactly it will take to break the tension.
@[draco]
you, dark and glorious, are enough
“And you’re not just as boring?” Draco questions back, the grin that splits his lips revealing bloodstained teeth. What anger he felt is extinguished by consuming amusement, and he laughs. It is a loud and biting sound, one that is clearly entertained but too cold to truly feel it. Draco knows that physically he is one of the more mundane creatures of Pangea; but he also knows the pink fish that stands before him is just as goddamn plain.
“Go on, tell me how boring I am,” he whispers and leans in, the glow of his eyes only JUST hinting at fear. Something feral twists in the pit of his stomach—perhaps Hades, the master he has always been destined to serve—and tells him this is what he likes. Is it masochism? He chews on the thought, and when he tastes the bittersweet flavor of sadomasochism—
Draco swallows the revelation with a hearty gulp.
“Tell me how boring I am while you prove how much you don’t belong here—or anywhere—because you’re the exact same kind of plain cruel that does not fit with the evil or the good.”
Draco shrugs nonchalant shoulders, casting those unfeeling eyes to the trees to his right.
“I can smell the fear on you, darling. Why don’t you just lean into it?”
hitch a ride on my violence
01-09-2020, 02:37 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-09-2020, 02:38 PM by Rebelle.)
I meet the razor blade of his smile with one of my own, a wolfish exposure of teeth more than a sign of humor. He's so sure he's right about me, and maybe he is. I am cruel, and I don't belong anywhere, these are not ground breaking ideas to me. But boring? Well, that we'd have to agree to disagree on.
"Do I look boring to you?" I ask, voice a low, sweet rasp across my tongue. He leans closer, and I push down the urge to step back, to forfeit ground to this devilish creature. "I think you're speaking from experience. I think you're just as much of a misfit outcast and you stay in that wasteland because it's all you know." I prod at the same bone he'd been gnawing in me, digging claws into the exposed nerve.
It hadn't taken very much at all to knock the mask of diplomacy from his hard face. He'd dropped it as soon as I'd started in on his home. It was a weak point for him, perhaps, a nick in his armor. With languid motion I stretched one leg in front of the other, a lazy circle mapping a ring around him. My inner wing grazed the curve of his hip as I pass, the feathers gliding insubstantial over star-dappled skin.
Despite the fear that has been writhing in my gut, I continue on with practiced cool. It never paid to let fear control me, even if it crawled up my throat and demanded release. Experience has taught me it only made the blood lust stronger to those with a taste for it. And this fellow? He had the taste.
My little walkabout brought me back around, to stand facing him. Eyes hooded, I did what he asked, and leaned in. In parody of the intimacy a lover might have, I lifted my face to hover close by his own, lips brushing the fine hairs of one ear. "Are you sure it isn't your own fear you're smelling, darling?" I asked, the endearment as much a threat in my mouth as it had been in his. Quick as thought, my teeth clipped the muscle of his neck, a pinch not designed to draw blood.
The lightest trace of saliva remained on him, a reminder that would burn the memory of me into his skin long after we parted ways.
@[draco]
you, dark and glorious, are enough
I’ve never been a misfit in my life, Draco thinks, staring down the gun barrel that is Rebelle’s face. He grins now, grins because this is who he has always been. Grins because this self-destructing side of him feels so goddamn good that he feels invincible. Grins because the pair carry the exact same kind of abandoned desperation.
Except Draco won’t give Belle that kinship; no, he won’t, and he will simply just pluck hers from her mind. They are the same and he relishes it. Relishes in knowing he never has to tell her just how much he knows. Relishes this power and this might and this evil he gets to sit in. It is not just cruelty anymore—no, Draco thinks he might not have a single good quality to him, and doesn’t that make one evil?
“Oh, goodness, no. I control fear, can’t you tell? You’ll never see that kind of base of emotion from me.” He lies, of course. He used to feel fear all the time; and now, when he is alone, he hears it loud and beating in his ears. He feels it in the rush of his veins.
It does not initially register that Belle has bitten him; but when his skin begins to singe, Draco lifts his head to peer irritably down at his poisonous companion.
“What a neat little trick you’ve got. Did you expect me to like it? Was this a failed attempt to teach me a lesson?”
@[Rebelle]
hitch a ride on my violence
I could push and push and push at him all day, and I'd get nothing but flat annoyance in return. No shouting, no cowering, no attempts or pleas at whatever better nature I'm supposed to have. Just like that, my interest wanes.
The joy of the hunt is not in the kill, it's in those desperate moments right before it. When you can see so clearly that life is ending and there's nothing, no amount of screaming or begging that will change that. They beg anyway. And that's what I live for. To see the need for mercy, and to deny it. That's a feeling of power I have yet to find the match for. Maybe we're too much alike, this graceless fellow and I. Maybe that's why he won't give me what I crave.
His denial of my claims only draw a wider grin on my ink dark lips. "Oh I can tell alright, my dear sweet monster. You've been running it up and down my spine for a while now. But I don't believe for a minute that you don't drink just as much as you pour." I purred, the strange, unnatural shape of my tail whisking through the air. An acid-charring scent assaulted my nostrils just then, the kiss of my venom working on his flesh.
I am just as surprised as he. I hum a note of curiosity. This will require further experimentation, no doubt of that. "Does a girl need a reason to pinch a mouthy stud?" I asked, angling my own head to look better on the hairs burning away as we spoke. How very unusual. My mind wandered to the fairy hill, the surreal journey I'd been sent on. Perhaps the old bats had come through after all.
I was through with him at that, my thoughts now occupied with questions of what and how. Is this a venom that will burn or melt? How much contact would it take to kill a rabbit? A deer? A horse? There was a giddiness to myself now, and I was ready to get to it. "Well, I won't say that it's been a pleasure. It hasn't. But I think I'll be seeing you around, my fine fiend. Don't forget me." I blew him a kiss and turned tail, wondering where the nearest warren of rabbits was hiding.
@[draco]
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