There had always been something not quite right about her. The innate sense that many had that told them to run from danger had always worked more like a magnet for her, pulling her closer instead of urging her away. The faster her heart beat, and the hotter her blood rushed in her veins, the closer she wanted to get. She was a fool, inside and out, too reckless and daring for one otherwise so mild and sweet. It didn’t always make sense, how she could somehow be submissive without being meek, or how she would so easily bend to their will without fully breaking. Nothing about her made sense, but it was all part of the thrill she was always chasing.
She had no way of knowing, of course, the intricate connections that she would have to the dragon-stallion before her. She was drawn to him the same way she was drawn to all things fearsome and powerful, and maybe someday this weakness would be her undoing, but naively, she doesn’t think it will be today. “Far stranger things have happened, but, somehow that scenario seems highly unlikely,” she laughs as she says it, shaking her pale forelock from her eyes. She can feel the way he watches her, but she is used to those inquisitive stares. Perhaps she is too perceptive from all those years without her sight; she had learned what the weight of eyes on her felt like. She had learned what it felt like when they roamed across her, usually lingering on the scarred sockets, but sometimes following the slopes and curves that lay beneath the oddly smooth porcelain of her skin.
In her blindness, she could pretend to be oblivious. She can see it now, however, how he is perplexed, and maybe even a little amused at her boldness. Even without his dragon form she is so much smaller than him, a delicate structure of bone and muscle, fragile and begging to be broken; he could end her so easily, before she could blink those almost-black eyes, but he could never comprehend that that’s what appeals to her.
She has been torn open and dismantled and rebuilt, body and soul; she has lived with a shattered or half-stitched heart, and the twisted part of her never feels more alive than when she is afraid and bleeding and wondering if this is the time she doesn’t come back.
She doesn’t expect it from him – doesn’t expect him to appease to that sick part of her – but she isn’t afraid of it happening.
“I don’t think the world is ever truly healed,” she watches the ring of smoke as it floats from his mouth, casting him a silent but satisfied – because her suspicions were confirmed – glance before continuing, “but the plague is gone, if that’s what you mean.” She shifts closer, until she can smell the spice and smoke of him, but she refrains from touching him, even though the temptation is laid so neatly before her. “Same thing I’m always doing,” she says, as if that in itself is an answer. To anyone that knew her, it would have been; some would have laughed, most would just shake their heads. She was incredibly predictable in her chaos, and she hardly cared anymore. “Usually I come here to find...old friends. But every now and then I stumble across someone that could be a new one.” She tips her head just slightly, glancing up at him through the white of the hair that frames her face. “Where do you go when you leave?”
@[Sabrael]