leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped
Were he privy to her thoughts in the way that she is privy to his, perhaps he might have laughed at the thought that he intended to cause her any harm at all. He is not violent by nature, Isakov. He is not cruel (not yet, though someday he almost certainly will be) and it had not occurred to him that his approach might be cause for concern. The flames deepen, jump and lick and bend themselves closer to the pair, but he does not notice, concentrating instead on becoming nothing at all as he passes through her.
She turns to look at him then and he wishes more than anything to sink into the expression she wears. What a thrill it is to know that he is the cause of it. She is a strong thing, he knows, she has made that abundantly clear and it is a very specific feeling of victory that surges through him when she pivots to face him. Not because he has surprised or tricked her, no. But because the expression had softened around her delight and that counts for more than almost anything.
He wears his slanted, boyish smile, meeting her golden eye before they are plunged back into darkness. A darkness tempered only by the soft glow of his starlight. He can only make out her shape for a long moment before his eyes adjust to this new darkness but his smile does not slip.
“No,” he tells her, the voice smooth in a way that does not fit his age. Perhaps she is teasing, playful in her youth, but he is not. “I don’t think I care much for games either,” he muses, recalling what she’d said about disliking silly games.
His gold eyes alight on the flame that jumps out of thin air at her chin, casting her face in a haunting glow. Suck a stark contrast to the darkness around them and he tilts his own head, unconsciously mirroring her. It almost draws him in closer but he does not allow himself to close up any of the space that separates them, slight as it is.
She can see beneath the surface and he wonders if she sees what he sees. The soft glimmer at the very center of them. Something he has mistaken for their souls but is something else instead. His expression does not betray this, though it would be no problem at all for her to see it through his mind’s eye anyway.
He considers her question a long beat before he rolls his shoulders. There is no point in being anything but honest, so he peers off into the darkness. “That depends,” he tells her, plain. There is nothing playful or coy in his tone, just as a bald kind of truth. “It depends on what you want to trust me with.”
@[Sunlight]