[private] Give me a reason - isakov

[isakov]

throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

He is not sweet, Isakov knows. Not sweet in the way she thinks him sweet, at least. But he feels no overwhelming urge to tell her this. Only smiles graciously, watching the corners of her mouth so intently that he moves toward her without realizing. Closes up more of the space between them without meaning to. Alas, when he realizes what he’s done, he’s grateful for it all the same. Because the smile is even more stunning up close. It fills him up with the impulse to reach out and touch her, to trace the lines of it himself.

Alas, he refrains. Moves himself closer to the river’s edge, though. He wonders what it’s like to feel silly. Even in his youth, he had been serious. Even when he’d taunted his sisters by hurtling toward them as fast as his young legs would carry him, frightening them with the threat of shattering, only to turn himself into vapor just before colliding with them. He had not felt silly then, only powerful.

But he had felt no want to manipulate fear since then. He certainly does not feel it now.

He does not immediately respond, distracted as he is by the notion of silliness. Until she offers her name and his smile deepens. He tilts his fine head and echoes it, smooth, “Elain.” Almost coos it. Reveling in the shape his gilded tongue makes when he says it. “My name is Isakov,” he tells her and delights, too, in the way she moves closer, too. In how she moves back to the water.

Her question is met with a breath of laughter and he shakes his head, pulling himself up onto the shore. “I wasn’t,” he confesses. He is not impervious to the cold, of course, only used to it. “But you look much warmer than the river.”

He sinks closer still, dripping water as he goes.

“Are you?”

isakov

@[Elain]