06-04-2020, 11:51 PM
choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
She is not afraid, she says, and he bites back the words you should be. Something stirs in his gut, an instinct almost, to make her afraid. Invisible claws that want to reach for her, to manually make her heart race and sweat shimmer across her skin, to make the hair rise on her neck and twist her mind until she is afraid even if she doesn’t understand why. There is something aching inside of him, something that he fights but he can feel himself growing weary, and he is afraid that someday he will not be able to look at soft, pretty faces and be able to keep himself from unleashing every ounce of terror and fury on them.
He doesn’t, though. Not tonight.
He is silent and unyielding while he watches her, wondering why someone so delicate and soft-spoken is not afraid when faced with something that is not exactly terrible, but dark and unsettling nonetheless. He thinks he might recognize something in the faint flicker of her eyes, something haunted and hurt – and he can relate. He wonders what kind of underground labyrinth of terrors she faced to become this way.
“Everything feels heavy,” he answers her, with an almost apathetic rolling of his shoulder. It’s strange, actually, that everything feels heavier up here than it had down there. Even with an open sky above and a lack of pulsating walls that closed and twisted through darkness, it still felt heavy – almost crushing.
He watches her for a moment longer, the quiet coiling like his shadows, before he says to her, placid but direct, “I want to know your name. Will you tell me?”
He doesn’t, though. Not tonight.
He is silent and unyielding while he watches her, wondering why someone so delicate and soft-spoken is not afraid when faced with something that is not exactly terrible, but dark and unsettling nonetheless. He thinks he might recognize something in the faint flicker of her eyes, something haunted and hurt – and he can relate. He wonders what kind of underground labyrinth of terrors she faced to become this way.
“Everything feels heavy,” he answers her, with an almost apathetic rolling of his shoulder. It’s strange, actually, that everything feels heavier up here than it had down there. Even with an open sky above and a lack of pulsating walls that closed and twisted through darkness, it still felt heavy – almost crushing.
He watches her for a moment longer, the quiet coiling like his shadows, before he says to her, placid but direct, “I want to know your name. Will you tell me?”
torryn
