come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
There was a time where such company would have delighted her, where his voice might’ve drawn a smile across lips so soft and pale. She can remember how much she had loved meeting others - how, inevitably, they had all become friends. But she does not remember how to be that version of herself anymore, and when the gravel of a voice that seems distantly familiar winds into her ears to settle among her thoughts, she all but flinches away from it. She could leave, she supposes. There is nothing to say she can’t, nothing that requires her to answer except a dilemma of her own manners - but it still remains that this voice in particular struck a chord within old memories. So she pauses, turns that beautiful blue and white face to the silhouette that moves toward her, gliding through shadow until it too pauses and her curiosity is appeased.
You never forget your first dragon - in fact, you may never forget any dragon ever. They are remarkably large and ill-tempered, and with entirely too many teeth. But he seems different than she remembers him being - so bold and brash when he came to clash with the people of Island Resort. He, much like her, seems reduced to a shadow of that former self. Just an echo of a memory, now fleshed out with time that has been mostly unkind.
“Then I will swim or I will drown.” She tells him simply, choosing in this moment that, for now, it does not matter who he was. She knows all too well how easy it is to become something else. But she doubts her choice at his next question, those chestnut eyes narrowing with pain and guardedness. “My pain is none of your business.” The dark around her grows deeper, blacker, and she is just about to turn from him, from someone who can so easily see her heart - and oh, how that scares her - when a second voice finds them.
She turns her face again, though she feels unsettled by looking away from the dragon for too long. Unsettled when she cannot keep her wary eyes glued to him. The voice, however, belongs to someone almost equally unsettling. All white like snow, like bone, like daisy petals - and while it should make the girl almost featureless, somehow she is not. Truly, the longer her eyes search and try to understand, the more she feels that this girl is carved from pearl and if Luster were to reach out and touch her, the girl would feel cold and unyielding.
Luster blinks when the girl speaks, drawn out of her quiet musings by the surprise that registers when those words take shape. Pretty? Luster’s honeyed eyes refocus and notice the dragon wings at the girls shoulders now, and the way her skin has begun to sparkle with new, twinkling light. It causes a pang of sorrow in her chest as it reminds her of someone else who used to shine that way. Her eyes close for a moment, hidden behind pain and beneath the furrowing of her brow as she turns her face from them for just a moment, trying to remember how to be whole. How to be soft and gentle and not so full of all these sharp broken pieces. But if she is as this girl says, if she is pretty, it is only in the way glass is when it shatters. Still bright and shining, sparkling at all those jagged edges, but dangerous to anyone who tries to reach for it.
“I am not ready for help.” She tells the girl quietly, tells the dragon too. “I am afraid of what I lose when I finally let go of this pain.”
even though i try not to
