She repeats his name with such a sense of easy familiarity that he knows he is in trouble. Even her smile reflects the relief that swirls in pinks and teals through the wavering cloud of the aura clinging close to that celestial skin. She is something entirely unreal, something entirely impossible and he is sure that if she were to claim that she was of the midnight sky, or the stars and distant milky way, he would not doubt her for a second.
“Well it seemed polite.” He says in response, his honey eyes alight with the smile that reaches from one corner of his navy mouth to the other. “I do occasionally like to pretend I have manners.” He cannot steal his eyes away from her delicate face, from the shining glass and that dreamy way she watches him as though he is anything like the marvel wading towards him. He is not unattractive, same as most, but though there are points of jeweled navy over his nose and his ears and the points of his legs, he is still merely plain in the lackluster gold of buckskin and white.
But he is not too proud - or too foolish - to spurn the way she reaches for him anyway.
“Clementia.” He repeats even as the cool smoothness of her mouth moves across his skin with the same curiosity of a river current. He would be sorry for the way his voice sounds almost dazed, for the way his warm eyes lid at this unexpected closeness. “Clementia.” He says again, and his voice is something more solid now as he takes his own steps to close the distance between them, letting his dark mouth trail over the glass of her curving neck before he pulls back to study her with a look of restrained curiosity. “And who is Clementia, with stars under her skin and a touch like the first whisper of spring after a long winter?” He cannot keep the smile out of his eyes, but it is something so quiet now, something subdued by the serenity of this girl he will certainly never forget, never have the fortune to keep.
But when she speaks, he breaks this quiet built as precariously as spider silk, laughing at the question she poses to him. “No, but I certainly will now.” He says, and he is still laughing softly to himself when she turns away and he finds in himself a brand new reflex to follow her. She had said she wanted company, after all. So he follows without a word, and when she pauses on the shore he can only just barely pull his eyes from the shining curves of her sparkling body, from the water that beads over her like captured rain touching all the places he cannot.
When he is abreast of her he does reach out again, tracing his lips along the curve of her jaw so briefly as though he has any right to reach for her like this. But it is like he cannot fathom her realness, as though he needs to reach out and feel the solidness of her glass body beneath his lips if only to be reassured that she is here at all.
“Do you -” but whatever he had been about to ask is gone in a moment as pain like nothing he has even known rips through his golden body, reducing his form to a sabre-toothed cat and his cry of pain to something like a strangled snarl. He staggers from her blindy, and then his roar is transformed back into the cry of a man again as he finds himself restored but with large wings that unfurl from the muscle of his shoulders with a loud snap.
He forces his body still again, forces his mouth to close over the strangled pain that rises from him like a burning dawn. But when his eyes lift to search the dark around them, the warm honey color is something wounded and wild. There is nothing here but them, though, and he can see from the way her aura is unchanged that Clementia had nothing to do with whatever kind of magic this is. In his periphery his own aura swirls in reds and oranges and yellows like an unseen dawn. He grits his teeth and tests the wings that now lay quietly across his back as though they’ve always been there, but they only lift and settle again despite the pain that feels like fists buried in the meat of his shoulders. Otherwise they are mockingly still.
“You are quite sure this is not a dream?” He asks finally, quietly, his expression made more guarded by the pain and confusion welling inside his chest when his eyes return to the shores of her shining face again.
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@[clementia]