The rise and fall of her breath moves him.
And now he is close enough to feel the heat as it radiates off her skin before it’s lost somewhere between the dew and morning mist, close enough to do with her what he wanted if he only chooses to want it. The knowledge alone is enough to carve the beginnings of a rakish grin of satisfaction across his lips and through his otherwise solemn expression. It’s always been the feeling of control that he liked best, and so in these few quiet seconds he flexes the hard line of his jaw as he admires his own good standing while thinking that the way his face hardens with every clench must make him look even more commanding, and powerful, and in control. How long, he wonders, before she realizes that she’s in the presence of greatness?
They are parallel in more ways than one.
He wasn’t always what he is now. Power, control, was in its own way a blossoming contagion. Once he was only a boy damaged by the ruin that was his mothers’ love story. All he had wanted then was his family made whole, his life made stable — but he kept wanting. He wanted and wanted and wanted, and took and took and took until the things that had meaning once lost it; until he wanted everything and nothing was enough. It became a vicious cycle and a self-fulfilling prophecy and here he is now: A god and a wreck all at once.
I see you, too.
He can tell by the way that she says it (obtusely oblivious) that she doesn’t. She can’t see the staccato hum of power that reverberates through every inch of muscle and fat on his body. She can’t smell that he, too, reeks of time and worlds and dimensions. If she could, he assumes, her mouth would be wide agape with her wonder instead of the straight underscore he sees now.
Am I not supposed to?
Here he smiles, and then he tilts his head as though in careful consideration of her question though every piece of him already knows the answer (not that he will oblige her with it, though). Glossing over her question Elektrum shakes out his silver mane with the casual swing of his head and a few minutes of silence he allows to span between them until he is ready.
“What can you do?” he says, turning his interest now towards the extra eye nestled in along her forehead, nearly hidden by unruly wisps of forelock that fall across it here and there. In spite of his ego there are parts of him that yearn to know why she wears time like perfume, dotted carefully against all her pulse points. Perhaps she would be useful to him.
“Show me.”
@[Giohde]