08-16-2016, 06:23 PM
i don't love you;
but i always will.
Riva refuses to acknowledge that they might have anything in common between them.
Like stories or origins, or feelings.
Her own resolve slips the moment the tip of his wing brushes the black hairs from her face. His kindness is slowly snipping the stitches on the thick meat of her spiteful little heart. How could this be happening to her? It isn’t fair that he can unravel the complicated threads of her hate and bitterness until he comes to the beginning strand that he holds high and tight, strums it like an instrument until the music of her life comes slamming back into her with a shocked breath and Riva slides her eyes away from because the look in them is unfamiliar to her, maybe unwanted too.
She bites back the retort that floods her mouth; he is too tender in his look to hurt and he wounds much too easily. Believe it or not, she has noticed how easily she can hurt him with a few words. Riva was quick to turn her face away from his, still entirely too aware of how he reached out to brush the hair away again but this time, her hair snagged on a single feather before falling back into her eyes. By the time she looks at him (with something like wonder in her eyes), he is downcast and eyeballing the earth more than is necessary. He’s almost too shy around her at times, but she knows how to inflame his senses until he snaps back at her except --
Riva doesn’t poke him. He promises to tell her the story, and she shows her approval with a nod.
They take to the trail together, and she cannot fail to notice how he brushes away the bushes and branches that would otherwise catch at their skins, scratching them. Again, how his kindness strips her of her hateful armor! His tale is no more long than hers’ was abhorrently short; “Are you that colt?” She has fallen back, stopped even as she asks him this. Her eyes hope to meet his, if only to judge the truth of his answer but she cannot help the sympathy that bubbles up in her gaze - they are a little alike, she hates to admit it but the truth is there, plain enough in his story and hers. She too, had been cast aside once nothing had manifested itself in her - she was a throwback to a magicless era, a cropout of ordinariness that had originally been bred out of the bloodline, but Riva existed despite that and her existence was an embarrassment to them.
“It isn’t just a story, is it?”
She looks up at him, even as his wing settles around her to ward off an offending branch and she doesn’t shrug him off as is the expectation. Riva is shocked to find they have crossed into the Jungle already, but she stays beneath the shelter of his wing to the point that her side almost touches his at every other step. His feathers tickle her ribcage, as she tells him - “Welcome to the Jungle.”Riva