[private] if my heart should somehow stop [suli]

[Suli]

Ice is what she receives in her search for warmth. Agitation bleeds palpably through the contact eventually stolen into a chuckle. Immediately Suli knows it is not one of honest mirth. No, it's a deep, rumbling sound of something much darker and it strikes her that she has never heard any semblance of a laugh from him before. Swiftly it devolves into a growl reverberating in the space he puts between them. Flashing teeth, black eyes that should terrify her while instead reeling her pondering of what chips his mind to so many jagged pieces. As if afraid to be cut by them, Suli does not pursue his partial retreat, standing so firmly where she is that a hurricane couldn't dream to knock her over.

But he could.

She knows he could if he wanted to.

Just as every one of his kind want something. "Eridan." The name takes her a moment to decipher, like some secret code for something she can't quite understand at first until a lightbulb flickers on in her skull and she remembers who that is. All she sees is a looming shape in the face of a name; a shape that condemns her even in its absence and in her ears she thinks she can hear laughter booming from that one's black hide, like it's all a sick game to confuse the life out of her. Because she is baffled, clear in the way she stumbles over how to answer Pernicies and his own shadow.

Great, sharp hooves stomp toward her unwavering frame, as if she is making up for not having stayed where he told her to before. In the meadow - her meadow - she stayed even when he demanded she leave. Incensed, she dares pin those ears and snort out frustrations that threaten to make her tremble. "Because you left! Why did you leave?" She dares counter his questions with her own, for surely that is the answer to it all. If he'd stop binding and cutting chains in nonsensical manner, if home just stayed where it should instead of crashing in and out like a roiling tide. But gods, if she didn't want to follow the violence of those crashing waves, sink into its waters, become one with it.

He - the beast, the tide, Pernicies, home - forces her back a step with equal measure control over her physical resolve as her emotional. If he only realized he was the one toying. But he is right, of course, and she doesn't argue with his claim that ropes them together forever. Yet his other accusation flares up that tiny stubborn streak seizing her spine. Another step back, unable to counter the duress of his body. "No!" She insists upon the blatant threat. "Last I saw of him was that day!" Not since the black stallion's game of lunging for her rump, sending her in circles of protests until Pernicies showed, a shield for her to skitter behind. To hide. She wants to hide right now. How long had it been? Suli doesn't know, blinking away the pondering thought to focus on the furious brute she should be worried about.

He does not seem to believe. He intrudes upon her, her insides dazzling in equal measure fear as wonderment as disorientation over what he's searching for. A hind hoof raises a margin, as if she's not quite sure what to do with herself in the moment, before stomping safely back to the earth again. Kicking him doesn't even cross her mind, the entirety of her body too rigid to lash out, fear ultimately subduing. "Nobody," she acquiesces to his demand for more answers, earnest, honest, pleading because she believes the threat with every fiber. "Nobody has touched me. I swear it on my life." Surely he knows how desperately she clings to that, even when all she wants to do is follow in Death's wake.

Suli

"Imagination shapes reality."