— I'll break you a hundred different ways —
He can almost feel when her breath stops. He can see the way the armor across her ribs seems to stop expanding, the way even her eyes go still – and yet somehow, above the crashing of the waves, he can hear her heartbeat. He can almost taste the blood that it pulses through the tangled network of her veins, as it continues to seep like a red sunset against her bones and skin.When the soft, almost gasp-like sound catches in her throat, he is not prepared for the sudden wash of heat it elicits; like a surge of hot adrenaline in his core, and he has to clench his jaw against. He still wants to touch her; wants to rake his teeth against the exposed bone and run his lips where the skin is raw and sensitive. He wants to see if his touch will trigger that sound she had made earlier, the way that his almost-touch had.
Something about her keeps him from doing so, and eventually he withdraws.
His name always sounds foreign on the tongues of others, since he so often kept to himself and rarely heard it spoken. Without meaning to, he memorizes the way that she says it, the exact way that her lips and tongue form the syllables of his name, and the way it sounds in the caress of her voice. Nothing in his expression changes when the sorrow begins to creep into the quiet lines of her face, but it shifts something inside of him. He cannot bring himself to soften, even for her, but the feeling of even wanting to creates an odd ache inside of him. A discomfort that he didn’t know how to alleviate. He is nothing like his father, but hardly at all like his mother, either. Where she fed on emotion, it made him want to close himself off, more so than he already had. He doesn’t know how to address the melancholy that glitters in her eyes – eyes that suddenly look like the sea, with the threat of tears that don’t quite reach the surface – but he does not shift away.
He cannot relate to not wanting to be alone, but he has known for awhile now that it is he that is different from everyone else. The chorus of conversation that rang across the populated parts of Beqanna told him that he was the peculiar one, the one that sought silence and solitude; not them. “You’re not strange.” Perhaps from another it would have sounded reassuring, but spoken in his rocky voice, it is just a statement. He knows she is referring to the bone and blood that ravages her tender skin, and he knows he could easily tell her of what happens to him when night falls. He watches her with such a simmering quiet that he almost does; the thoughts form in his mind, but they never quite make it to words in his mouth. They turn to ash on his tongue, instead.
Bright red drops form along her brow, sliding along the edges of the ivory plate on her forehead, and though his eyes watch, he does not move to brush it away. He tilts his masculine head at her question, capturing her jeweled eyes with his dark own, and holding her gaze for a fraction too long before he finally says, “I have seen terrible things, Wonder.” (Her name feels delicate in his mouth, as if the gravel of his voice might break it.) The depths of the forests harbored a darkness that only a select few were aware of; things that made him grateful that he was nothing but bone in the dead of night, things that he avoided even in the light of day. The steel gray of his lips lift into something that is like a smile when he says, “You are not one of them.”
— and I'll make you remember my face —
