09-25-2021, 01:02 PM
She is not a nurturing thing, Camellia.
Ice does not sustain life, it preserves it.
She is not like her sisters, the two warmest of them, the ones who command flowers to bloom at their feet. The ones who drape the landscape in their heat. She is not spring, she is not summer.
So, she watches him wrestle with the things in his head and in his heart and feels no impulse to assure him that he has done the right thing. She feels no inclination to lift him up to some new plane, to show him the sun.
No, they stand together in the storm and she listens to the things he tells her and she takes them for what they are. The truth and nothing more than that. They are not an invitation for her to change his mind and she would not have tried even if they were.
They are two creatures battered by a storm of their own creation. She does not know his name and she does not offer her own. He will exist in her mind as a magician built to disappoint, though he has not disappointed her. (Though there has been precious little opportunity. She is not a thing with expectations, Camellia. She exists for the winter and little more than winter. It is difficult to disappoint someone who cannot be disappointed.)
She tilts her head, the flesh bleeding glacial blue beneath the surface of the ice and she draws in a breath.
And then she smiles.
“How terrible that must be for you,” she says. And there is no sympathy in her tone but there is no mocking either. It is only the same thing he had offered her: the truth. She does not try to convince him otherwise.
“Have you always been this way or did something change you?”
Ice does not sustain life, it preserves it.
She is not like her sisters, the two warmest of them, the ones who command flowers to bloom at their feet. The ones who drape the landscape in their heat. She is not spring, she is not summer.
So, she watches him wrestle with the things in his head and in his heart and feels no impulse to assure him that he has done the right thing. She feels no inclination to lift him up to some new plane, to show him the sun.
No, they stand together in the storm and she listens to the things he tells her and she takes them for what they are. The truth and nothing more than that. They are not an invitation for her to change his mind and she would not have tried even if they were.
They are two creatures battered by a storm of their own creation. She does not know his name and she does not offer her own. He will exist in her mind as a magician built to disappoint, though he has not disappointed her. (Though there has been precious little opportunity. She is not a thing with expectations, Camellia. She exists for the winter and little more than winter. It is difficult to disappoint someone who cannot be disappointed.)
She tilts her head, the flesh bleeding glacial blue beneath the surface of the ice and she draws in a breath.
And then she smiles.
“How terrible that must be for you,” she says. And there is no sympathy in her tone but there is no mocking either. It is only the same thing he had offered her: the truth. She does not try to convince him otherwise.
“Have you always been this way or did something change you?”
@firion