[private] I'm quick with the bullet when it comes undone; hourglass

[aureus]

Aureus

oh, these wings, they flicker and my feathers stir
'til I'm an ancient soul in a cascade world

He could live for a thousand years and he is not sure that he would ever forget the look on her face.

The way she had turned to stone. The way that the air around him had turned to ice. The feeling of it in his chest, dragging him below the surface until his lungs had practically collapsed in his chest. He had carried with him ever since, feeling that strange and heady feeling of disaster with him. As though he was the harbinger of everything that was to go wrong—as though he was as terrible as he had always believed.

It is a devastating feeling to find your failures are worse than even you had imagined.

So when he sees her again, everything in him grows cold and then sharp and then empty. He feels his limbs grow leaden as he comes to a pause, the autumn sun slanting down around him, dimming his milky glow. Aureus swallows, hard, and all of his thoughts of escape, of trying to avoid her, of leaving, disappear. His mind goes blank as quickly as it whirls into a cataclysm of thoughts, the roar growing.

His pale lips part, but no sound comes, and he feels the urge to run, but his feet remain planted.

There is the only thought that perhaps if he is still enough, that she will not see him and he will not have to see that sharp hatred in her eyes once more, deserved as though it may be.

And he does his best to hide in plain sight—the same coward she had accused him of being.

and I'm quick with the bullet when it comes undone
I got a head like a turret with a mouth for a gun