She feels his breath first, and the nearness of it is almost enough, the heat of it as it climbs across the mountains and valleys of her skin. It coaxes a long-lost sense of peace from the guarded stone walls she’s thrown up in her chest, reminds her what it is like to be acceptable. Only her parents and her brother have stood this close to her, allowed her ruined wrongness to be pressed into the soft warmth of loving, unbroken bodies.
But she cannot help but wonder at the way Nightlock does not step away from her - and she knows she is close enough that he should want to. Not only can he see the way her red skin stretches like a weeping welt around the patterns of bone, but he must also be able to smell the copper stink of her. It is a smell that even the ocean cannot rinse from her - a smell that is, admittedly, less strange in this sickened plague-world, but still wrong all the same.
She braces for the moment, counts the seconds as they pass, imagines a dozen different ways he’ll pull away and a dozen different things he’ll wound her with by the whip-lash of cruel words on his tongue.
But it never comes.
No pain, and the seconds are so many that they start tripping past themselves as she counts them.
No. He says, and it takes her a moment to understand why he’s used that word, because the breath he releases in a sigh across her withers makes her thoughts spin like blown dandelion seeds behind her eyes. The world is already terrible enough. And she knows the words, but it is hard to remember the things they mean when those soft teal eyes are lost in the maze of the feathers that now droop gently by her nose. So busy following every line and soft, slanting angle. Tracing every smudge of dark color that mimic the steel and pale bellies of stormclouds.
Then he touches her, lays his lips against her skin, and she is undone.
She might’ve cried out if the surprise hadn’t paralyzed her, but it is all she can manage just to close her eyes and bow her head and wonder if she had ever been touched like this before. When his mouth begins its path across her bare skin and to the ridges of bone, hitting that line of welted, ragged skin in-between with a gentle carelessness that makes her gasp softly and press her face into the soft of his feathered wing, she knows she has not.
He pulls away, but she can feel that sunshine-soft sensation of his lips when they skim over her mane, can feel his eyes too when he turns to find her face again. But she doesn’t look up at him, isn’t ready and doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to see a shade of mockery in his face to let her know this was cruelness. Doesn’t want to not see it either, because she isn’t sure what that might mean, isn’t sure if that would be worse. Isn't sure which she is more scared of.
Besides, she is content tucked against his side now, content with those storm-gray feathers pressed against her cheek and tickling at the soft of her bare nose. He doesn’t touch her anymore, but he also hasn’t pulled away. Why would you want to hear stories to confirm it? And she is yanked back into the present, sudden and jarred by reality as she remembers the nature of their conversation, of her questions. She steps away from him, sorry and apologetic, glancing at the places she had smeared red over his grey, stained him with her rust. She is horrified in an instant, reaching out to clean a spot near his shoulder with the soft of her tongue until she feels the tines of her antlers bump higher near his withers and pulls back, distressed, wishing the beach would open up and swallow her deep inside itself.
“Because I think you’re wrong, and maybe you just need to say one out loud to realize i’m worse.” Soft, so soft, and like a dropped glass ball shattering and tinkling apart. She’s taken a few more steps back now, and there is a soft kind of wild brightening in the teal of her eyes as she turns her face to him, shrinking backward like a trapped bird still unsure if it wants to escape at all.
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love