01-24-2018, 05:20 PM
"Reagan is not Karaugh," he states flatty after her first sentence, but she is screaming now and he closes his mouth to accept the punishment he had known was coming. But had that been anyone other than Karaugh (possibly Reagan or Kolera) his history would be different.
Even though it is no surprise, the passion behind each word she spits causes him to flinch.
Levi doesn't have a good excuse so he doesn't fabricate one. What happened in that cave still confused him, and it would be a long time before he understood himself well enough to try and figure it out. In the dark below the earth, he had been King of their small world- the shroud of poise he wore for his father's benefit had slipped from his shoulders the moment he stepped into the privacy of that cave.
Karaugh: the explicit, the unshakable temptress - seeing her vulnerability had made him lose the delicate control he held over selfish, starved, and suppressed darker nature. He knew she had brought out the primal in him, but he struggled to see exactly where he had crossed the line which was so obvious to everyone else. The fact that he cannot see this line makes the distaste he feels for himself even more potent. His moral compass is not calibrated, he decides, he is broken.
Not that he wanted to be good, not that, but the thought that the stallion in the dark had been the true Levi - that Ceara would understand this - nearly paralyzes him.
His usually orderly thoughts are in a scramble, but Ceara drives them all away. She takes a step away and he is there, pressing his muzzle to her tear-dampened cheekbone if she will let him. The furry of her emotions terrifies him, but this can not drive him away, he would not leave her for selfish reasons again.
A storm is raging in his chest as he watched the hot tears pour down her face, his own directionless anger morphing into self-loathing. Her brother knows her better than she thinks he does, he probably knows her better than he knows himself and her pain moves him. Each hurtful word she hurdles at him hits the mark, but not for the reasons she thinks. She does not insult him, she can think no lower of him than he thinks of himself, each word burns because he knows that her displeasure is only so potent because he let her down. Each word she speaks would only cause him to turn a cold shoulder on the speaker if they came from any other mouth.
"I'm sorry," he says for the second time, with all the pain in his belly behind it. "I'm sorry that I did anything that hurt you," he murmurs into her tears because he is struggling to find his breath.
Levi
so scream you, out from behind the bitter ache.