that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
It does not elude him that she angers at his use of her nickname, and the realization is enough to make him tilt his head in curiosity—not off put by her aggression toward him, if only because it is hardly the first time that she has done so. But he cannot focus on such things for long. Instead she continues to conversation casually, as if discussing the weather, and begins to tell him the details that he had asked for.
And no small part of him wishes that she hadn’t.
Because the longer that she talks, the more she tells him, the more that roaring in his head begins to grow. The more the shadows begin to pull in toward him, tightening around his legs and crawling up his neck. His companion lifts off his golden back and pulls shadowy lips back from its teeth, a growl beginning to vibrate through its body. Firion’s own eyes clear and sharpen to that same acute point of his father’s, his fury blossoming in his mind like an untapped thing, a tsunami if he did not control it soon.
“Your children’s father sounds like a piece of shit,” he grinds out, teeth clenching and a muscle in his jaw working furiously. There is a pain in his chest at the idea that she’s had children with someone else, a blind and selfish pain when considering his own children littering Beqanna, but it’s drowned out by the knowledge that she’s done so with someone who would harm her. Someone who would harm those kids.
He sweeps his gaze from her scars to her face, studying her orange eyes as if he would find the answer there. As if he would be able to piece all of this together. “Why haven’t you torn him apart yet?” he questions, because it’s easier to ask it of her when every instinct in his head is raging at him to do something. To pluck his name and face from her memories and do it himself.
“You’ve never shown any hesitation in enacting plenty of violence against someone who would raise a hand toward you,” he continues, as if he could forget just how she’d done so to him. When he had merely pressed close to her, when he had been near enough to touch. But this stranger brings her to death and remains standing? He can’t make sense of it. Can’t fathom the answer is that he is so much more despicable that it was preferable and he is left with only that dull roaring in his head.
Perhaps that’s why when she throws the question back at him with the frustration and anger typical in their interactions that he relents. He doesn’t brush it off or lie. He just peels his lips back and shrugs, eyes still gleaming. “I wasn’t overly fond of what people saw when they looked on me in the dark,” his voice is roughened and dark, shadows chasing every word. Without a noise, he shifts himself. Turning back into that thing of rotted flesh and death. Blood on his mouth and skin peeling away. Eyes fogged over.
He stands like that for a minute, skeletal head peering back at her, before he turns back into himself.
His breathing comes faster, heart pounding his chest, and it takes everything in him to stand there. To know that he’s revealed himself in a way that he had never done intentionally.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
@Mazikeen