07-21-2016, 09:40 PM
i don't love you;
but i always will.
In the back of her brain, Riva knows he must be mad at her for vanishing into thin air. Neat trick, huh? It was instinctual - to disappear; after all, hasn’t her bloodline been doing that for years? Oh no, wait - that was abandoning, but to her it was the same thing, though not quite when she did it to him. In her mind, she hadn’t abandoned him - just left, after all, there was nothing to keep her there, no agreement that she would stay and split her time between the Jungle and him. Riva really doesn’t think she has done anything wrong, knows he might still be mad, but fails to comprehend why - he had others, so why should he care about her?
(No one ever had, see, except maybe Lagertha who had her own machinations in mind when it came to the paint mare.)
Yep, he’s mad… she can see the muscles tense beneath the black of his fur; a thrill of something (she’s not sure what exactly) goes tapdancing down her spine until he turns his grinning face to her and a sneer sits prettily upon her lips. “Neither,” she snaps back, and then he had to go and look all lost-boy on her, cowed suddenly by something she simply did not understand. His moods moved too fast for her to follow, left her head spinning as he flashed a devilish grin her way and Riva’s face wavered in its severity for just a moment, allowing a chink in her spiteful armor to show. There was something in the way he kept looking at her that unnerved her and caused her to snap at him again, “Stop looking at me like that!”
She snorted out her frustration and shook her head, suddenly peering at him from too much hair in her eyes - damn forelock, the thing was always in her way! The moment she was unguarded and silly-looking, he takes a step forward and she balks at the encroachment on her bubble of space - damn him! She thought, thoroughly disgusted as her own nose neared his in that age-old ritual all horses cannot keep from doing, even the spite-addled paint, as she blows air back at him in. Damn, he smelled like the plains, all that grass and sunshine, and she found herself curiously missing it, missing - WAIT A MINUTE, HOLD UP, HELL NO! Riva slams the door on that thought, locks it up tight, nails boards all over it and chucks the entire thing into the sea of I-never-thought-it and nonexistence.
Their eyes meet - sounds so romantic, and Riva feels sick to her stomach.
He says her name, almost sighs it and there is a thing in that sighed name that worms its way into her. The sadness in his voice robs her of spite in a single breath. She doesn’t understand it, why is he sad? What is there to be sad about? Riva thinks it has nothing to do with her, it must be something else…
“Why are you… sad?” she asks, regrets it in the same instant she asks it. Riva tells herself that she doesn’t really care about his feelings, but a tiny part of her says that’s a lie - she cares, more than she likes to admit. Damn, since when did she start caring about shit? Damn him! He did this to her, made her weak and stray from her path of pure spite. It is easy to blame him, rather than to think that Riva is evolving into someone else. Much easier to blame him for everything, or rather convenient since he’s right there - big, black, and brawny, and why on earth was she thinking about all of that?! Riva shook her head, but still found that she could not move away from him and almost reached out to touch him but her muzzle clearly stopped short of its mark - his shoulder, and stayed there between them like a broken offering until she pulled it sharply back to her, tucking it high and tight against her neck like she’d been burned.
Riva