05-07-2023, 11:27 PM
who could ever leave me, darling,
but who could stay?
but who could stay?
She has built armor against anger over the years.
His pitch-dark stare and words that long to become knife-sharp cannot find a mark, glancing off the shield that had allowed her to survive in the company she keeps for as long as she has. There may be times that she still withers beneath Carnage’s disapproving stare or feels tension steal through her body on the rare occasions that Atrox’s temper flares in her presence, but she is relatively impervious to the irritation of strangers. She is not terribly concerned with making him like her; she also does not think she is the reason for his resentment, because she so rarely is.
And she can feel it, that undercurrent of sorrow that threatens to pull his anger under, to drown it in something thick and heavy.
It did not matter that a new kind of magic coursed through her now, it is her old magic that sits closest to the surface, and she feels his emotions without searching for them. It felt like an invasion, as if she had opened a door to something she was not supposed to see, or overheard a conversation not meant for her ears. But while she cannot unlearn the information now that she has found it, she does not comment on it. She does not tell him to direct his anger elsewhere; she does not tell him that it is a wasted emotion, that it will do nothing to improve his situation, just as she does not feed him promises of hope that it will get better (perhaps it will not— the world is cruel like that).
She only watches him, unmoved.
“Achille,” she echoes his name from earlier, and she likes the shape of it in her mouth — it feels soft and lilting, nothing at all like the storm-cloud of a man in front of her. “Where are you from?” she asks, at risk of deepening that well of anger he is harboring.
His pitch-dark stare and words that long to become knife-sharp cannot find a mark, glancing off the shield that had allowed her to survive in the company she keeps for as long as she has. There may be times that she still withers beneath Carnage’s disapproving stare or feels tension steal through her body on the rare occasions that Atrox’s temper flares in her presence, but she is relatively impervious to the irritation of strangers. She is not terribly concerned with making him like her; she also does not think she is the reason for his resentment, because she so rarely is.
And she can feel it, that undercurrent of sorrow that threatens to pull his anger under, to drown it in something thick and heavy.
It did not matter that a new kind of magic coursed through her now, it is her old magic that sits closest to the surface, and she feels his emotions without searching for them. It felt like an invasion, as if she had opened a door to something she was not supposed to see, or overheard a conversation not meant for her ears. But while she cannot unlearn the information now that she has found it, she does not comment on it. She does not tell him to direct his anger elsewhere; she does not tell him that it is a wasted emotion, that it will do nothing to improve his situation, just as she does not feed him promises of hope that it will get better (perhaps it will not— the world is cruel like that).
She only watches him, unmoved.
“Achille,” she echoes his name from earlier, and she likes the shape of it in her mouth — it feels soft and lilting, nothing at all like the storm-cloud of a man in front of her. “Where are you from?” she asks, at risk of deepening that well of anger he is harboring.
Ryatah
@achille