i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
She does not even try to guard her emotions as they flash across her features, tangling in familiar memories. They are almost like daggers, the sharpness of their edges cutting as though to remind herself constantly of the pain. As though that is all she is and all she ever will be.
And perhaps it will be, if that is all she chooses. Reave can see the lines of it whispering out before her. A life of endless pain and grief and anger, fortune made fact by the power of her own belief. She could choose differently, but he has to wonder if she will ever find the strength. He can see how his mother had tried so hard to be that strength for her. Just as she had for so many that she loved.
Just as she had for him.
He can see the way his similarities to his mother are like a punch to the gut for her. A reminder of something she had been trying so hard to forget. A smile curls the corners of his lips at that. If only she knew just how surface level it truly is. In nearly every other way, he is almost nothing like the woman who had birthed him.
“You already know who I am,” he replies easily, blue eyes gleaming. He steps closer. She could burn him, but she would have to touch him to do that. “She died giving birth to me,” he continues. There is a rawness to his words, his own reckless grief and anger at the memory fueling it. She had revived much later of course, but it had been too late for some things to be undone. “Her bones could not grow as I did, so she starved and suffocated.”
His eyes burn with the memories as he stares at her. They should be fuzzy and distant (he had been a newborn, after all), but instead his own ability had ensured they would forever be held with a vicious clarity. “She named me Reave with her last breath.” He laughs at that. How could he not? The irony is nearly unbearable. As the laugh fades into a grin, he adds, “I’ve done my best to live up to her expectations.”
He shifts then, tilting his head, expression provocative. Brazen had loved him of course, even then. Still loves him. And she had loved this woman. She would never have admitted it, of course, but Reave knows too well what lurks beneath those denials. Now, as he stares at the woman he’d seen so often in his mother’s memories, a daring smile on his lips, he asks, “Did I answer your question?”
reave
@Brinly