Skandar sees her anger immediately. He feels it seep into his skin and press heavily into his bones and perhaps a year or two ago, it would have made him smile and then - of course - he would bend to her wishes, unable to see the sheer ferocity on such a beautiful face. Beautiful, he thinks mildly (though his thoughts torrent like the sea, waxing and waning), finding that it had been a long while since his eyes were able to rest on something he found beautiful. For a moment his eyes show this - not softening but deepening, fixated and terrible.
He doesn’t think about what she has done in his absence. She had been the one to order him into the darkened world and he obeyed; nothing else exists beyond that, only the atrocities he bore witness to and took part in himself.
Then, like clockwork, the stallion steps back into the world with little struggle. Her obvious displeasure does nothing to stop him from finding the shadows of the caverns. His steps are determined and fluid, the sound of his hooves on the clay somehow grounding him and bringing him back into his own body each step at a time. Inwardly, however, the young stallion’s mind is chaotic; darkness still splatters his thoughts, fading in and out, attempting to become what he had once been for so long. He swallows hard, listening fiercely to his own footsteps and the sound of Aela’s, focusing his attention on the things at are (and not the things that were, or will be). Perhaps Aela would even begin to notice the tremors within his galaxy-strewn muscles - a bizarre twist beneath the surface, unwarranted and ominous, as the monster-version of himself desperately tries to rip free.
The coolness of the cavern releases a weight from the stallion’s shoulders. He visibly relaxes, inhaling deeply of the cave’s dampness, nearly melting into its embrace. Skandar sighs audibly before turning to face Aela, those same burning eyes clicking thoughtlessly to the burning blue that has become so familiar. His gaze flickers downwards to the pulsing glow of the golden stripes; an act he has seen before and he briefly wonders if perhaps he should be worried far more than he currently is to be in her presence.
There is more beneath the surface of her glowing skin and piercing eyes - he feels it in the very thoughts she shares with him, those memories that sear into his mind and leave him feeling somewhat dizzy. A familiar feeling, but one that he had long forgotten.
“You said my name,” he manages to remind her (and himself) in a disgruntled murmur, his voice graveled and rough.
“I thought maybe you had forgotten me.”
A smirk - barely visible but there - finds his violet lips. Perhaps it forms to hide the truth behind his statement, that even in the darkest depths of his absence he had thought of her and was left to face the fact that he would be just a memory to her. Nothing more.
He wants to hear her say it again, but even he knows not to continue to prod at a spitting viper.
skandar
@[Aela]