A smile toys at the edges of his mouth when she snaps at him over the nickname and his eyes light up. It feels like a chink in the armor, something that he wants to worry at like a loose tooth—like a wound. The shadows begin to swirl around his legs and he watches her with a smile that turns heated, a challenge. “Why don’t you like me calling you that, Maze?” he lets his tongue dwell on the nickname, rolling it on his mouth like a delicacy, savoring the simple syllable of it before releasing it into the air.
“I like calling you that,” he says as he takes a step forward to match the one she takes. The space between them is crowded now, and he feels her presence more acutely. Can imagine that he feels the breath that whistles between her teeth. “Maze,” he says it again and flicks his glance up to her, snagging her gaze. There’s nothing for a moment, and then two, just the sound of them breathing.
And when she speaks, the words like a gutshot, he swallows that pain down.
It wasn’t anything he didn’t deserve.
He’d dwell on the ache that pours through him later.
“I have few talents, you know that,” his lips quirk up in the corner of his mouth into a crooked smile. Something honest and vulnerable in the way that he shrugs, the way he tucks away the wounds inflicted by the truth she hurls at him. “But I would stay now for you, Maze,” again, her name rolling off his tongue. There’s another beat as she invites him in and before he steps through, he offers a confession.
“That day in the meadow,” he lets the memory slip into her mind—when they had been young and brash and he had stepped toward her as he does now. “You called it a game.” He angles his golden head to the side, letting the memory continue to play out in both of their minds. “I never understood why, but I think I do now.” His heart pounds in his chest and he wishes his magic was enough to stop that. Wishes it was enough to pour some of that emotion back into her. “It was a game, but not the way you think.”
His mouth pulls down in the corner, his face growing more somber.
“It would have been very real for me, Maze. You always were.”
And without saying anything else, he accepts her invitation and peers inside of her. The feelings that come are hard and fast and he knows his breath hitches, his eyes going cloudy the further that he looks within her. There’s something like ash coating his tongue. Death that roars in the back of his mind. His magic pounds through him, desperate to pull him back, but he ignores it and looks further in instead.
There’s rage. Emptiness. Death.
None of it makes sense and so little of it feels like her.
It feels like him.
He swallows and his chest heaves, eyes still unseeing, body immobile. His companion wakes on his back and begins to yelp and scratch at him, but he doesn’t return—not immediately. Not until he has satisfied his curiosity. Not until the dread stitches itself onto his very bones. And before he goes, he plants a single emotion in the back of her mind. Something warm and as golden as the sun he never sees. Something made up of his curiosity when first seeing her. The feeling of kinship that had frightened him. The awe at her strength when she’d torn him apart. The endless appreciation for what she’d done for his brother.
It all melds together and he plants it in her mind like a flower, the bloom unopened.
He retreats from her mind only then, his eyes unfogging, a sheen of sweat covering him. He swallows hard as his companion settles against the shallow cuts along his back and finds her gaze again.
Seconds pass between them before he finally offers one thing:
“There is plenty to stay for still.”
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
this time it's even in the right thread