Brinly
She wasn’t used to feeling attached to anyone. She wasn’t used to feeling anything at all beyond the usual bitterness and anger that she harbored like some cherished treasure; the only thing she had identified with, and when it was gone she no longer knew who or what she was. Every time she is with Brazen and feels something – a flicker of happiness, a brief moment of softness, anything besides the furious flame she was so accustomed to – it makes her want to draw back into herself, to pull away from the armored girl until she is back to a place that she cannot reach her.
Until she is back to not missing anyone, until she doesn’t have anyone doing stupid and foolish things on her behalf, like going to Pangea.
But the feel of Brazen’s lips against her shoulder keeps her planted, and when she turns to run her nose against the armor of bone across her face she notices the new horns for the first time, and withdraws. “Those are new,” she says with a hint of suspicion, wondering what had happened for her to have earned those. She wonders, not for the first time, why others awaken with something seemingly harmless, when she had been burdened with something that did nothing but harm anyone that she wanted to be close to.
There is a moment when her jawline goes tense, when there is a faint tendril of jealousy that crawls up her spine for no apparent reason. Perhaps not jealousy, but just a stronger version of the bitterness that was always there. She doesn’t know the story of how Brazen earned these new horns; she doesn’t know that they came at a price, and that she shoulders an invisible burden along with them. Even without knowing that, though, she swallows everything away, because Brazen was never someone that she wanted to feel animosity towards, for any reason.
“No,” she answers her, and when she goes to drop her face away from hers there is a second that her mouth almost brushes against the unguarded skin, where the armor does not lay. She ignores that growing ache in her chest at the idea that she will likely never feel what lies beneath the ivory bone – the softness of her skin or the feel of her curves – and she steps away from her. “I’m fine.” She looks away from Brazen, at a path that winds its way into the darkness, and says in a voice that is void of almost all emotion, “I should go back to Pangea before they realize I was gone. I don’t want to give them a reason to come after Nerine.” Her head turns again, and this time her dark brown eyes level with the bright blue of hers. “Or you.”
— burn until our lives become the embers —