03-22-2022, 03:46 PM
liesma—
He owes her nothing.
No explanation and certainly no apology.
It had not been an accusation, only an observation, but it is so easy to misconstrue things when the mouth delivering the message does not bow or bend around the soft edges of a smile. (This mouth has never known such softness, not even when her mother gave birth to the Night and her sister came into the world, the most beautiful thing she had ever laid eyes on.)
He hadn’t meant to be, but does anyone ever? Or does time simply pass that way it is wont to do, unflinching, unyielding?
The flames curl around him now as if he has commanded them to do so and she remembers the way he had lit the branch ablaze the first night they’d met. A reflex, it had seemed. Just as, once, she could only pull down the stars with wishing.
“You needn’t ever apologize to me,” she says, leveling him with that same steady gaze. Depthless. (She cannot know how he yearns for the stars, just as he cannot know that she has darkened them so that she might be cast in the glow of his flame instead. So that, for the moment, it might belong to them both.)
“Have you been well?” she asks, tilting her head a fraction before adding, “and your strange friends, have they been well?” And she casts that dark gaze into the shadows, remembering that she had not been able to see them but had felt them all the same.
Then, a beat of silence before she shifts her focus back to his face. Handsome now, angular, without the softness of youth. “Where did your travels take you?”
No explanation and certainly no apology.
It had not been an accusation, only an observation, but it is so easy to misconstrue things when the mouth delivering the message does not bow or bend around the soft edges of a smile. (This mouth has never known such softness, not even when her mother gave birth to the Night and her sister came into the world, the most beautiful thing she had ever laid eyes on.)
He hadn’t meant to be, but does anyone ever? Or does time simply pass that way it is wont to do, unflinching, unyielding?
The flames curl around him now as if he has commanded them to do so and she remembers the way he had lit the branch ablaze the first night they’d met. A reflex, it had seemed. Just as, once, she could only pull down the stars with wishing.
“You needn’t ever apologize to me,” she says, leveling him with that same steady gaze. Depthless. (She cannot know how he yearns for the stars, just as he cannot know that she has darkened them so that she might be cast in the glow of his flame instead. So that, for the moment, it might belong to them both.)
“Have you been well?” she asks, tilting her head a fraction before adding, “and your strange friends, have they been well?” And she casts that dark gaze into the shadows, remembering that she had not been able to see them but had felt them all the same.
Then, a beat of silence before she shifts her focus back to his face. Handsome now, angular, without the softness of youth. “Where did your travels take you?”
—staring at the sky
watching stars collide
@Fyr