she'll lie and steal and cheat and beg you from her knees
make you thinks she means it this time
He comes to her like a vision—too slow, syrupy and underwater, and then all at once. She freezes, and she will later hate herself for it, her muscles turning to stone as the adrenaline spikes in her, the static in her brain growing into a steady roar. He is there, and her tongue is swollen in her mouth. He is there, and the air has been sucked from her lungs. He is there and the world tilts beneath her until she is falling.
Falling, falling, falling —
She doesn’t move.
She doesn’t breathe.
Instead, her icy blue eyes sharpen, her face impossibly blank.
How is he here?
She can feel Red rise and move to him, the motion instinctual and natural, and it’s only when it is rebuffed that Pyxis is able to shake the paralyzing disbelief because he is there but it is not him.
Not the man she had seen last. Not the man she had run from.
He is colder, harsher, angrier, and it twists her stomach to see what the years have done to him. How he has been mangled from time, embittered and furious. (How he is wholly different and yet entirely the same and how, despite the differences, she aches for him as if no time has passed at all.) Red is calm, but she has watched her enough to know the pain underneath the dismissal, the refusal. She can feel the hurt in the wolf who had thought she was only doing what he had wanted, and she suddenly wants to scream. She wants to beat fists against his chest and break through the exterior he has placed up, this facade.
Instead she stays silent, swallowing once and forcing herself to flick her tail against mahogany haunches in a casual display. She draws upon every ounce of willpower and forces her body to relax, cocking a back leg and settling onto a hip, all of the muscles pulling upon her face relaxing. It is an old game between them. An old game, an old defense, and she turns to it blindly in her hurt, in her need.
He can’t see the storm that rages beneath the surface.
He can’t see the way she strains for him, barely restrained from rushing into his embrace.
One corner of her lip rises into a crooked smirk and she shakes her head, the faux laugh spilling from her mouth frothy. “You look terrible,” she cannot bear to say his name. Almost chokes on the thought of it. Instead she wrinkles her nose and looks down to the wolf who paces near them, agitation clear in the way that she growls underneath her throat. Rolling her eyes, she looks back at the stallion, heart in her throat.
“I don’t need anything from you, love,” she hates herself, nearly hits her knees at the cavalier way that she addresses him, but it’s the only way to protect herself—it’s always been the only way. “We’ve been getting along just fine without you.” The cruelty is blatantly untrue, and the wolf glances up at her as if to prove a point, but Pyxis pointedly looks away, avoids the questioning stare that strips away her defenses.
Because the truth is that Pyxis hasn’t been okay. She hasn’t been getting along.
She has been running for years to get away from exactly where she ended up, squaring off with the only person to ever make her feel weak, to ever make her question the distance she kept between herself and others. In this moment, she longs for Malis. She longs for a sister to tell her what to do. To protect her.
To tell her that it’s going to be alright when it feels like the world is collapsing around her.
she'll tear a hole in you, the one you can't repair
but I still love her, I don't really care
um, okay, so i underestimated how much i freaking love them and i was already super excited for this. :| :|