09-22-2015, 08:38 PM
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
“You’re right,” she agrees with a smile that seems more like a grimace, “I should be more careful.” She doubted he would ever guess that they meant different things. He spoke of her fire and impulsion, she of a heart she needed to guard more closely. “But what have I got to lose?” She gives him another hollow smile that does not quite reach her eyes. It was easy to feel invulnerable after being reduced to nothing, what could be lower than your lowest point. Emotionally she had been obliterated, perhaps mentally too, and she was almost positive there wasn’t room for more pain, not even physical.
A strange desire for violence blossomed like a bloodstain across her chest. She almost didn’t recognize it at first, but the seductive darkness pressed fire under her skin and she found herself craving the way it, for a moment, made the pain dull to background noise. But when she looked into his eyes and saw something there, something almost kindred, the fire suffocated within her veins and the fight (mostly) left her.
“Makai.” She tells him (even though he doesn’t ask) in a voice that seems both filled with longing and cut through with contempt. “I thought you were someone named Makai.” There is a small victory in the way she was able to say his name, not once but twice, and say it without crumbling beneath the shame and regret it coated her with like ash. “I would be sorry if you were him, too.” But she looks away quickly to hide her face, to hide an expression of heartache that threatened to undo her efforts of strength and fortitude.
When she turns those stark green eyes back on him, there is a small amount of amusement gleaming there despite the cloud that hangs over her shoulders. “If this has been pleasurable for you, you truly must make a habit of keeping poor company.” Her jaw clenches but for once it isn’t with tension, it’s to mute the laugh that reflexively climbs to her delicate mouth. And then with a single word he quells the laughter and she lifts her chin curiously at him. “Magnus.” She repeats his name and it feels important, feels relevant, but she can’t place the reason why. “Should I know that name?”
She takes a step closer, passive, as if the dark is the reason why she can’t place this man who feels both like a stranger and also achingly familiar. But the closeness changes nothing of course, except maybe the amount of tension rippling beneath the crushed gold color of his skin. Her brow furrows subtly beneath her forelock and it softens the expression of quiet settled over the hollows and angles of her refined chestnut face. At her withers her wings drop and tuck close, the now chestnut leather blending to the skin of her ribs beneath the weak half-light of the stars. “Well, Magnus,” she says with the ghost of a smile, this one the most believable so far, “what do you say? If I promise not to attack you again, can I stay for awhile longer?”
I need to know why I feel like I know you, she doesn’t say.
how light carries on endlessly, even after death
Oksana