leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped
He wonders if there is a point to being cruel if it is not intentional. He thinks that, if you are to be cruel, you should be certain about your reasons. You should own cruelty, as you own all other things.
He will grow to be cruel, Isakov. He will grow to be cold, unflinching. There will be no accident about it. He will learn the things they love and he will use these things against them. He will yearn for love and, when love is not provided to him, he will make it so. He will know his cruelty, he will know its reasons. He will own it the same way he will own his loneliness, his desperate want to be loved. And he will not realize that manipulated love is empty until much later.
But for now, he is not cruel. He is just a boy, swallowing his confusion in the face of someone much older. He thinks of the stars, or whatever star it was that had tricked him, and how they might care differently. He is too young to know anything about the multitude of ways that feelings can be misconstrued, so he just nods. Like he understands.
Like he has seen it firsthand in the way that his mother loves the glass stallion who had taken Isakov in as his own. (He has, of course, but he does not know what it means).
He shifts his weight. Turns his fine head to study the galaxies splashed across his hip. The stars winking back at him, the soft glowing nebula edges. He draws in a smooth breath and shifts his focus back to Tarian’s face. “They have always been with me,” he says. “I got them from my mother.”
He rolls his narrow shoulders in a kind of shrug. “How did she trick you?” he asks then, perhaps curious about love and all of its forms. “Your star,” he clarifies.
@[Tarian]