and where you invest your love, you invest your life
There is something about her anger that pleases him.
He was not an overly cruel stallion, but it was comforting to be around someone with so many barbs—with such a sharp tongue. It did the work for him: the keeping people distant. You couldn’t be close with someone who was threatening to tear your head off—which meant that he was safe. He didn’t need to worry. He didn’t to be concerned. It relieved him, the feeling washing over him momentarily.
He still stiffened at her voice and laughed, the sound not unkind but not soft in the air. It cracked out like a whip between them and he smiled with sharp edges as he fully formed. “You don’t know the first thing about my nightmares, princess.” And she didn’t. His dreams were normally quiet things. Things that started out so slow like the ocean lapping around the borders of his vision. Then they turned dark, stormy. They were like being thrust into the middle of the hurricane. They were of drowning. There were of his wings being stripped from his back. Screaming as his immortality peeled back from his flesh.
They were of love. Always of love. And all the ways that it could kill him.
He watches her with narrowed pale eyes for a second, roman-nosed head tilting to the side so he could consider her. She was unique—a melding of bird and equine that he had never seen before—but he was not afraid. What he feared was much deeper than physical pain. “I cannot even begin to express how much I am not your guardian angel,” he huffed loudly, “and how much I would never want the job.”
Watching over someone? Taking care of them? Serving as their guardian? It was perhaps the worst calling that he could imagine and the antithesis of his entire purpose of life. “Do you need someone to look out for you?” he asked finally, unable to resist the barb. He pulled his feathers in closer and then fell silent.