06-19-2017, 09:16 PM
the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
He is quiet - too quiet, and she almost squirms in the length of it, certain that he could hear her quickening heartbeat if he listened closely. However, the longer she looks at him, she thinks he is not listening to her at the moment, or even looking at her but seeing something else, maybe remembering. She is amazed at how quick and how far the tide of a memory can carry them, far off on a sea of gray matter and long-ago minutes all tied up inside their brains. Maybe, she even envies him just the slightest little bit because he looks mesmerized and not in an altogether unpleasant manner and she has nothing to mesmerize her that way any more, not even the stars in the night sky that could never hold a candle to the stars that Giver could make dance around his head as it leaned in close to hers.
Her skin feels tight, fit to burst and she backs up a few steps from him, her little body starting to shake from the anger and the fire that she just barely holds beneath. “One touch,” she mutters, one touch and… and what Spark? She doesn’t even know, but it leaves her just as uneasy as he is, and she pins him with a fiery glare, unaware that the breath comes huffing out of her as if forced, and that her own stance is braced, but against what - him? He reacted, and she reacted to his reaction, and somehow, they have become catalysts for one another in a short amount of time that leaves her deeply uncertain. “I did nothing wrong,” she pleads in the tiniest of whispers.
Spark almost sighs, snatches it back on the rolling motion of a swallow and looks away from him for just a second - maybe even two, before looking back at him again. Her mismatched eyes catch on the twigs and burrs and knots in his red dead-flame hair; he looks something like fire made flesh but softer somehow, as skin usually is and fire is usually not. But he also looks like she used to, before the fire cleansed her and left her sleek and new. She misses that wild and woolen look, that of a life well-lived and carefree, though Spark suspects his is not as carefree as hers’ had been. He seems rougher, harder for the things that he’s seen or endured, though she can only guess at this.
Something inside him seems to snap; he braces himself and draws back from the light touch of her muzzle. She is not insulted in the least, recognizing that she was at times, rather intrusive and the fire only made her bolder in doing things like that. Her face falls though, the moment he grimaces and swings his face to her but no horror fills it when she looks upon the ravaged eyeless part of him. Spark grows quieter, softer, even sympathetic as if she understands on some level, how it is for him. He seems to be battling something, and her touch was the catalyst to a fight that goes on inside him but is evidenced by the way he flings back his head, forelock flying, and flares his nostrils as if all the air in the world could calm him now.
She ducks her head beneath the narrowing of his russet eye (he is all reddish tones, from leaf to clay to fire and he almost too much to look at, even underneath all the grime and dishevelment he hides behind), chastised by the one-eyed glare and his question. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, but it comes out no louder than a whisper but even whispers have a way of being too loud and her ears splay sideways in uncertainty. Spark stares at the ground, almost on the verge of scuffing a hoof in the dirt just to dispel the anxious feeling that overtakes her but all that happens is that the fire starts to build, to burn right through her and she flings her own head up and snaps, “Nothing! I did nothing to you!”
Spark