He doesn’t need to break into her mind to feel what she’s feeling. Her anger is raw and potent—so much so that he feels as though he can taste it on the tip of his tongue. It feels fuzzy, as though he has been poisoned, and there is a part of him that wonders if he has been. If she had the ability to slip a drug in his system that would let his body rot and decay as it once did in shadow. The same thing now causing that milky glow—sharpening and enhancing the handsome features that it had once destroyed.
But he doesn’t care.
He just focuses on the markings that crack all over her body. Feels the air practically buzz with everything she both felt and didn’t. He doesn’t miss that she doesn’t reply to him. Doesn’t further enflame the conversation that spits between them. Part of him wishes that she had. Wishes that she’d launch at him with teeth and claw. Tear into him so that he could focus on that instead. It was easier. So much easier.
But she doesn’t. Instead, she gives him the truth and he visibly flinches from it, recoils because he hadn’t expected that answer. Never expected that anyone would possibly see past the curse that had simmered in his blood, so very different from the one that haunts her step now. The shock that widens his golden eye is chased by something else, something bitter, and he rolls his shoulders as if he could get rid of it.
“Then perhaps I did you a favor,” he finally allows, not knowing how to untangle the feelings that her confession knots in his chest. A muscle works in his jaw and he swings his gaze up to her again, studying her with an intensity he didn’t bother to soften. “I would stay with you now,” a confession for another, as he thinks about all the times he has infuriated her and how this blind rage of hers now was the worst.
“I would stay to find you again, Maze.”
And, tentatively, he lets loose a single tendril of his magic to work toward her, a brush against her mind, a request to slip in and see what he might find under what has been fractured there.
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)
@Mazikeen