that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
She brings the cold, the bite of frost, the promise of winter.
He feels it first as a nip and then as fang against his flesh and then something deeper. Something that cuts to the marrow of him and reminds him of that emptiness that chased him all those nights—of the loneliness and darkness and fear that had set up his mind and had never been able to be shaken.
There is a temptation to banish it from him. To pull the natural heat from all around him and flare it into a summer to combat her cold—to warm his bones and ease the vicious ache that settles into him. But the pain is too real, it sharpens his mind and he leans into it instead, a knife to his throat. Instead of pushing back with his own heat, he draws forth her cold even more. He pours his magic behind it until the snow begins to fall around them, the flurries thickening and the promise of a winter storm a kiss upon the sky.
He clenches his jaw against the way his teeth would chatter in response.
Instead a muscle jumps and he angles a predator eye toward her. “I have,” he affirms, but he doesn’t know how to explain where he has been or perhaps he simply doesn’t want to so he doesn’t elaborate. He just rolls a jaguar marked shoulder in difference, the snow settling along the broad swath of his back.
“Have you come from afar?” he asks.
He could pull the answer from her mind, he knows. Could tear it apart in search for the truth. But he has never been particularly comfortable with such invasions of privacy, with ripping away the mystery that another may hold to their chest and so he lets them remain guarded and tucked away.
Instead he just regards her from a distance, waiting for whatever she was content to give him.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
@camellia