Cleave can feel the edges of himself beginning to solidify. His personality is nothing but a constantly changing, ever-evolving flood of feeling; he can feel it beginning to pull together beneath his touch, the edges of it starting to carve into something real, into something that he can sink his teeth into. But there are still pieces of him that he hasn’t fully worked out yet. There are pieces of him that vacillate between a youthful curiosity and an adult’s rage—a barely suppressed fury at a world not like he expected it to be.
“I can do whatever I want,” he grinds out, his lips tight as his red eyes follow her, but there is no real heat behind the words. He merely rejects the idea that certain things are to be hoarded by adults—as if children do not have their own things to brood over. Cleave thinks of a father he does not, and will likely never, know. He thinks of his brother and sister who are like him and yet know nothing of him.
He has plenty of things to brood over.
Still, she sniffs around him and he watches her carefully, feeling the flames pull tighter into his body, the edges of them licking the air but smothering out on the edges. Beneath his hooves, the plants of the playground begin to smoke, his hooves growing hotter and hotter until the vegetation becomes ash.
“I don’t think anyone would want to know me,” he says evenly, his boyish voice flat and his eyes hard. “I’m not exactly friend material.” But he doesn’t dismiss her just yet and he doesn’t leave, instead choosing to study her, watching the way her coat flows from color to color. “It’s not safe here.”
A pause, the first flickering of a smile around his mouth.
“That’s why I’m here.”
He doesn’t elaborate.
@[Astarielle]