I was a poor boy; you were a bright light
I was a sinner and you were a snake

Brunhilde has none of her mother’s softness—none of her coyness—and yet there is something about her that always reminds him of Kensa. Something that strikes at him like flint whenever he is near her, whenever he studies her openly. He isn’t able to quite put his finger on it, but it exists there between the spaces of his ribs regardless, an itch that he can’t scratch and yet persists, constantly biting at him.

He is not surprised when she nearly runs into him, she isn’t difficult to see coming after all, but neither does he move out of her direct path. Instead, he raises an invisible brow, his face stuck in that same stormy expression that he always wears, his wings folded dark and red over the wide expanse of his back.

“Me again,” he says for not the first time and certainly not the last. He catches the blood on her leg and the scab that has recently been torn away, but he doesn’t mention it. From their few encounters, he has been able to surmise a few things about the mare before him and none of them led him to believe that she was the type who eagerly accepted unrequested advice. He certainly would have several pieces of it for her—including, perhaps, most urgently that she cut ties with the man he had met with her before.

But it’s not his problem and he has little habit of taking them and making it his own.

So he just shrugs.

“Luck or curse, I guess.” His voice is dry and husky, running through his mouth like river stones tumbling over one another. “Why do you always feel the need to make a man feel so welcome?”

This at least accompanied with a ghost of a smile, although it leaves before it can fully perch.

shook like some old souls when our bones broke
swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame

I was a poor boy; you were a bright light
I was a sinner and you were a snake

Brigade knows what it feels like to feel a sense of kindness blossom in your own chest and to dig your heel into it before it can truly flourish. How many times has he been in a situation where he has turned to cruelty as a way to escape his own weakness? As a way to ignore the pain that stabs at him? He understands perhaps too much the emotions that run rampant through her—the need to drive others away and the sense of power it can give you unmatched by anything except the cold, ringing loneliness.

Her own mother had born the brunt of it, but he doesn’t think of her much anymore.

Does his best to drive her and their child, wherever they may be, from his thoughts.

His lips quirk at her teasing. “I have been around those more unwelcoming than you,” there is something like a knowing in his eyes when they meet her gaze, an honesty because he knows better than most that it’s not simple to feel the way that she feels—it’s not easy to soften the walls that guard your heart. “I will do my best to be genuine,” he rolls his wine red shoulders, “but it’s not something I’m well known for.”

Her confession catches him off guard and for a second, he just stands there, grey eyes steady but wide, his lips pressed hard together. There are a million things that he wants to say. He wants to tell her that he doesn’t want to hurt her. That he’s sorry that she has been hurt. That he understands. But he can’t imagine her enjoying such things coming from him—she would view them as patronizing, as cloying.

Instead he glances away, looking up at the same stars she had observed just seconds before.

“I hurt others because it’s easier than admitting to myself what a fuck up I’ve been.”

He frowns, feels a tightness in his chest when he thinks about all of his mistakes.

“I’m sorry too.”

shook like some old souls when our bones broke
swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame