[open] buried it where bones are buried

[firion]

FIRION

He has a talent for getting in conversations like this. Conversations where he is asked to untangle himself and pull himself apart. Where he is put on display for everyone around him—where he is to show them the darkest parts of his heart. Perhaps it is payback for how often he pushed others away. From how quickly he ran away from anyone who might come too close. Who might come to know the truth.

There is a multitude of reactions that rise in him.

Shame. Anger at being asked. Fatigue.

But he doesn’t show them on his face when he knows the only reason she asks is because he had offered up the truth to her first. So he just rolls his shoulder and offers a half-grin, the crooked smile softening some of the harsher angles of his face. “I both am and am not what others need me to be, but always at the wrong time.” A cryptic answer but he has no other way of explaining without more of her time.

“I don’t mind the disappointment though,” he continues and he relaxes a little into the confession, because with the wind continuing to howl around them in this personal blizzard, they feel alone. He feels like he can share these things with the girl carved of ice and she will not react.

Is this when he tells all of his sins?

“You grow used to the weight of it and then it’s like you’ve never known anything at all.”

so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)

@camellia

[camellia]

camellia

She knows nothing of the weight.
 
And would it make any difference at all if she did?
 
She had pledged allegiance to her sisters and then she had pledged allegiance only to the winter that lived inside her. How long has it been now since the last time she set foot in Tephra? (Perhaps this is a disappointment in itself. Perhaps the sisters miss her and she has failed them in some irreversible way.)
 
She watches him, studying the way the crooked smile softens the plains of the magician’s face while the storm sinks bone-deep. (Sometimes she misses the arctic bite of the ice, the way the wind would sink its teeth into the meat of her lungs. Sometimes she misses falling victim to winter. Misses the way she trembled in the cold.)
 
She cannot relate and it means precious little to hear him say it. 
 
She had not asked him how he disappointed, she’d asked him why but she feels no overwhelming urge to point this out. Instead, she turns her focus to the storm that continues to rage around them. 
 
Right place, wrong time.
 
She opens her mouth just barely, lets the wind curl sweetly on her tongue. Lets the snow collect on her teeth. And then she smiles, glances at him out of the corner of that glacial blue eye. 
 
“Do you warn them?” she asks and does not elaborate who she means by them, “do they know you will disappoint them?” 
 
And what she doesn’t ask is: are you sorry?
 
 

[firion]

FIRION

It does not occur to him that he answered the question wrong—that his puppeteer has such poor reading comprehension skills that he is saddled with—and so he doesn’t correct himself. Doesn’t go back and answer the why that she had originally asked him. He just watches her quietly, studying the way that she is carved of wind and ice and the storm that he helps bring to her now. He wants to know if she has always been this way, if she was born into the cold or carved from it, but it feels rude to ask.

He knows what it is like to inherit something that changes you entirely.

Both for the good and the bad, although even the good felt weighted.

So he keeps his questions for himself and just watches her instead, doing his best to not be cut on the sharpest of her edges. “I have before, in my own way,” he says and wonders if that’s true or if he has lied simply because he is too ignorant to do otherwise. He hopes that he has warned them. Hopes that they have been able to discern that is what he means by his actions—by the way that he pushes them so far.

“Not well enough though,” he amends and his mouth turns downward in the corners as he wrestles with this fact—this knowledge that he has not ever been good enough at warning them so that they might protect themselves from the disappointment that he inevitably brings. “I think they hope for the best.”

He manages a wry smile then, finding her cold face.

“But there is no best, unfortunately.”

so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)

@camellia

[camellia]

camellia

She is not a nurturing thing, Camellia.

Ice does not sustain life, it preserves it.

She is not like her sisters, the two warmest of them, the ones who command flowers to bloom at their feet. The ones who drape the landscape in their heat. She is not spring, she is not summer.

So, she watches him wrestle with the things in his head and in his heart and feels no impulse to assure him that he has done the right thing. She feels no inclination to lift him up to some new plane, to show him the sun. 

No, they stand together in the storm and she listens to the things he tells her and she takes them for what they are. The truth and nothing more than that. They are not an invitation for her to change his mind and she would not have tried even if they were. 

They are two creatures battered by a storm of their own creation. She does not know his name and she does not offer her own. He will exist in her mind as a magician built to disappoint, though he has not disappointed her. (Though there has been precious little opportunity. She is not a thing with expectations, Camellia. She exists for the winter and little more than winter. It is difficult to disappoint someone who cannot be disappointed.)

She tilts her head, the flesh bleeding glacial blue beneath the surface of the ice and she draws in a breath. 

And then she smiles.

“How terrible that must be for you,” she says. And there is no sympathy in her tone but there is no mocking either. It is only the same thing he had offered her: the truth. She does not try to convince him otherwise. 

“Have you always been this way or did something change you?”
 

@firion