09-27-2026, 07:38 PM
bael
If there’s something flirtatious in her it’s lost on him.
Or, rather, wasted.
But she’s still talking and she’s insisting that she may someday meet someone stranger than him–which wouldn’t surprise him, as he is more ugly than strange, really–and continuing to press him for his name like it matters.
He has half a mind to tell her that they don’t bother naming the ugly things, they just set them loose on the world. That only the beautiful things are worth calling by name. Like her. Empyreal. She had been so eager to tell him her name that it seemed what she was really eager for was to be known. But if she was looking for someone who would eventually stand up and say they’d known her, that she’d existed and she’d mattered, he wasn’t really the best choice for the job.
“Because it doesn’t matter,” he tells her, plainly. And it doesn’t. He’d been born a demon and his mother had named him accordingly, leaving him alone in the ice, tethered so that he could not follow. Because he’d hurt her and that was all it had taken for her to abandon him. The world is not all soft things, he knows that, and that’s more important than his name.
“What good is my name to you?” he asks, tilting his ugly head. “I was no one to you when you walked up and I will be no one to you when you walk away.” This, too, a statement of fact. There is no bitterness in it, no harshness. He does not resent that she will forget him when they part ways because he will forget her, too, and it will not be written in history that their paths crossed beside a half-frozen river once.
Or, rather, wasted.
But she’s still talking and she’s insisting that she may someday meet someone stranger than him–which wouldn’t surprise him, as he is more ugly than strange, really–and continuing to press him for his name like it matters.
He has half a mind to tell her that they don’t bother naming the ugly things, they just set them loose on the world. That only the beautiful things are worth calling by name. Like her. Empyreal. She had been so eager to tell him her name that it seemed what she was really eager for was to be known. But if she was looking for someone who would eventually stand up and say they’d known her, that she’d existed and she’d mattered, he wasn’t really the best choice for the job.
“Because it doesn’t matter,” he tells her, plainly. And it doesn’t. He’d been born a demon and his mother had named him accordingly, leaving him alone in the ice, tethered so that he could not follow. Because he’d hurt her and that was all it had taken for her to abandon him. The world is not all soft things, he knows that, and that’s more important than his name.
“What good is my name to you?” he asks, tilting his ugly head. “I was no one to you when you walked up and I will be no one to you when you walk away.” This, too, a statement of fact. There is no bitterness in it, no harshness. He does not resent that she will forget him when they part ways because he will forget her, too, and it will not be written in history that their paths crossed beside a half-frozen river once.
( they won’t muzzle the mouth that just bit you )