you pour the water —
She crushes every dark thing that rises in her throat with a swift hand. Wrings the life out of it as she lifts rose gold eyes to her nephew, unbeknownst to her, and studies him in that quiet way of hers. The way that she stills so perfectly so that she can acknowledge all aspects of a stranger—drawing them out before her and pulling them, piece by piece, until she can study the fractions before she comprehends the whole.
There is nothing to give her away, nothing to speak to the inky rivers of doubt that spread beneath her skin, her face composed into the lines of the devout—beautiful and pious and unfeeling.
When she does speak, her voice is soft like her mother’s. Quiet and shadowed.
“It is not,” she cannot bring herself to lie to him, even if she detects the threads of hope that lace through his voice—something she discerns but does not understand. Not yet. An angle of her youthful head, the light of her halo illuminating the softness there, the features not yet defined as they one day will be.
She wonders why he does not know of sunlight, why he must ask her, and something stirs in her chest. Pity? Perhaps. Curiosity more likely. Perhaps even sadness, a kinship that she cannot name. “I am not made of the sun,” is the only answer she can give him because she doesn’t know how else to tell him what she is indeed made of. The darkness that creeps over her angelic heart. The wrongness of her.
So she offers him a smile, just the barest curve of lip, and nods her head.
“My name is Baptiste.”
— I would haul the stones
@Nemeon