i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
“I’ve never cared for pity.” He grins, eyes fever-bright behind his mask. “But then, I never cared much for kindness either.” There is something liberating in her honesty. A freshness he hadn’t known his life was lacking until this moment. He can only repay her with a little honesty of his own, even if it isn’t a very flattering truth. Still he smiles recklessly in the face of it. “I suppose that doesn’t say too much about me though, does it?”
He enjoys the way she can’t seem to help but react to him. And though he almost certainly should not, he enjoys her reactions. Perhaps a little too much.
She challenges him on it. Her light tone belies the ruthlessness of the words and the sharp edges in her clear gaze. The thrill of it rolls through him. Hitching up his chin just a notch, that tempestuous smile on his lips, he offers her even more truth. “I am always easily amused, but you are particularly entertaining too.”
There is no kindness in the fire she had imagined in his gaze. There is only a man of wanton disregard and devilish certainty.
The mirth in her normally shuttered features is kindling to that flame. He doesn’t need her to wear her emotions so plainly to know what she feels, but he rather likes watching the way it plays across her pretty face. It’s a gap in the wall she has been so steadfastly placing between them. A slip that shows her armor isn’t nearly as impenetrable as she wants it to be.
His own features crease in amusement when she informs him she had thought it would chafe. “Oh, it does, but the chafing is the least of it,” he replies blithely. She hadn’t been asking about chafing though, no matter what her pithy response might imply. There is too much hiding beneath the surface of the still pools of her eyes. A depth not yet plundered.
Not by those in her past, and not by him. Not yet at least. But Reave has always been adept at plundering. After all, isn’t that what barbarians do?
Her thoughtful question causes the grin on his face to slip. It’s another thing no one has ever asked him before, and he can’t help but wonder why she asks now. It’s not inspired by any great depth of feeling, or the pity she claims she would have given him and lied about. When he finally does reply however, it’s not clear whether it is if he does find relief, or if he wants to find relief.
“No.”
She would not pity him now, regardless of what she believed of his denial.
The grin finds his lips once more when she dares him to enter the water with her. It’s almost as though she knows he would never decline such a brazen offer. As though he physically could not decline such a thing. His own humor is a perfectly wicked mirror of her own as he takes a slow step into the water, his eyes never leaving her face. “I’m torn between asking whether you just want to see if I’ll sink beneath the weight of my bones,” he pauses, grin shifting into something more devilish, eyes burning bright blue, “or if you’re trying to find a way of telling me I need to bathe.”
reave
@revelrie