01-28-2016, 03:32 AM
is crowded w/ lovers & searchers
& leavers so eager to please & forget.
Big, brave, strong.
He smiles, but it falters, quivering at the edges a bit. He tries for steadiness, looking from the girl to her mother. When one is so adept at reading the minds of others – and using that knowledge for one’s own selfish ends – to be read becomes a source of anxiety. To be used against him, a paranoia.
He would vastly prefer to hold his muscles and features at strict obeyance, than be betrayed by them.
The one. He lets out a small laugh, fishing into his mind – is this the first time he has ever been a ‘one’?
For his birth-mother, he was a many; he was one out of six, and the last at that, but they were just that – numbers. One after the other, crowding her world like vermin overpopulating. And then very soon after he was nothing, as her mind went quiet.
To the other mare, he had been something profound. But what exactly, he could never tell. Her mind was not clear. It spoke disjointedly and he figures now, that it was her hermitic life that made her so inept at reading lips.
“Kidd,” he echoes. He could tell her not to put too much stock in him, because there are much bigger, and much stronger. Much and more.
But he is not so terribly inclined to quell her hope, so he winks instead.
“Looks just like you.”
He was never told sweet fairytales, or anything soothing and motherly, as a colt. But he considers the pursuit of successful childrearing to be a noble one. Beqanna is too heavy with the walking unloved. The pride in Merope’s eyes would stagger him, if he were alone and it were nighttime. Where he could be unseen and unread, and let the jealousy and bitterness writhe through him like a charge of electricity. But the daylight makes him naked, and also more agreeable, so he feels instead a tug towards her.
To something in her, and its fairness sets off a warring clamour in his own chest.
One thing bays for her weakness, the other, her light.
“Merope,” if he could, he would tell her not to worry about her stammer. He could even tell her that silence was his milk and childhood – but he is reticent to reveal his ability, clinging it to his chest like something precious and he is needy of the power. But it is tentative, balanced on the edge of remaining unknown and undefended against. And, because he does not want to alarm her. “I imagine you are keen to have more pairs of eyes looking out for her?”
He could say that there are many who see her as easy as hatchlings in a nest.
But he imagines she already knows that. Maybe she knows demons intimately, too.
Trashlip and Phina's
BASE BY BRONZEHALO