Should she take offense?
Any other proud thing might, but she is a cold thing. (Is the heart also made of ice? It is so hard to tell when everything in her is so hypothermic.)
To hear him say he prefers no companion at all perhaps should have chased her off—why should she stay where she is not wanted?—but she stays all the same and he materializes from the snowbank at her side. How easy it would have been simply to dissolve, leaving her there with only the storms of her own creation and she would never have known the difference except that the quiet would have been different, deeper.
A disappointment.
Her smile remains, though something in it shifts, as if this is some dark joke between the two of them. She does not know what it means to disappoint or to be disappointed, not yet.
Would she have been disappointed if he had left her there alone in the storm?
She studies him a long moment then, the gold of his face, the new light in his eyes. And instead of asking him what it had felt like to be the cold, she asks, “and why are you such a disappointment?”
As if it is that simple. As if it can be broken down so easily. She tilts her head while the snow continues to fall, accumulating every place it can, including along the long trail of their spines. And the smile is there even still, lurking in the furthest corners of her cold mouth while she waits for his answer.
Any other proud thing might, but she is a cold thing. (Is the heart also made of ice? It is so hard to tell when everything in her is so hypothermic.)
To hear him say he prefers no companion at all perhaps should have chased her off—why should she stay where she is not wanted?—but she stays all the same and he materializes from the snowbank at her side. How easy it would have been simply to dissolve, leaving her there with only the storms of her own creation and she would never have known the difference except that the quiet would have been different, deeper.
A disappointment.
Her smile remains, though something in it shifts, as if this is some dark joke between the two of them. She does not know what it means to disappoint or to be disappointed, not yet.
Would she have been disappointed if he had left her there alone in the storm?
She studies him a long moment then, the gold of his face, the new light in his eyes. And instead of asking him what it had felt like to be the cold, she asks, “and why are you such a disappointment?”
As if it is that simple. As if it can be broken down so easily. She tilts her head while the snow continues to fall, accumulating every place it can, including along the long trail of their spines. And the smile is there even still, lurking in the furthest corners of her cold mouth while she waits for his answer.
@firion