Brinly
She can see a spark in his eyes that slowly fades the longer he looks at her, and it feels like burning, heavy stone right in the center of her stomach. It’s no different than with everyone else, she realizes. Everyone greets her with a friendly face and laughing eyes, but one scorching remark from her, one look into her hard, smoldering eyes and she can almost see them recoil.
They are not afraid of her; they just don’t understand why they are being reprimanded for doing nothing. They don’t understand what they could have done to a stranger that was so offensive that they deserved to be snapped at.
And the answer was usually nothing.
He steps closer to her, and she doesn’t know why today she doesn’t have it in her to keep fighting. She doesn’t know why something inside of her feels like it has finally crumbled into ash and dust, and all she can manage to do is step backwards and reinstate the space between them. There is not sharp demand to not come closer. No frantic plea to not try and touch her.
Just a quiet, muted brokenness hiding somewhere in the furthest depths of her dark brown eyes.
“Brinly,” she offers quietly through the dying embers that she has swallowed away. She wants to apologize, but the words are burnt away in her throat before she can form them and so she simply angles her auburn face away from him. She takes a few steadying breaths, before returning her gaze back to his, her brown eyes seeming to flicker in the darkness. “Why are you so far into the forest?”
— burn until our lives become the embers —