08-22-2016, 09:42 PM
He laughs and the sound is so unexpectedly harsh that her face darkens a little with uncertainty. She hadn’t been expecting that from him, the dark that blossomed like a bruise against his lips, and when he goes silent thereafter she wonders if maybe he hadn’t expected it either. Her dark brow furrows a little, the whorl of white on her forehead disappearing beneath thick tangles of black forelock tipped with frozen, rusty ends. She wants to ask him why he laughed like that, without any humor gleaming in his face, but when his gaze drops determinedly down she finds the question whisked from her lips.
Instead she chooses to share the silence with him, quiet for as long as he is, though instead of watching him she lets her eyes drift to the points of purple and blue mountains in the distance, noticing the way they broke up the view like violent bruises. She doesn’t mind this quiet, the way silence stretches between them as smooth and untouched as the surface of lonely lake. It is a busy kingdom, but she does not live at its heart. He has always preferred the echo of empty caves and the impossible heights of the mountains set like a crown beneath the stars. She thinks it is because she was born outside these walls, because she has known more than just this kingdom of the north.
From her periphery she sees him shift, and she turns her gaze back on him at the same moment his pale eyes find hers. There is none of the dark from earlier, none of the harshness, so she smiles at him in a quiet way - the subtle upturning of lips and the softening of a furrowed brow. But he looked away again almost immediately, and she followed his gaze with a frown and her head cocked slightly to one side.
“Do you ever worry you’ll get too comfortable with being alone?” She asks quietly after a moment, turning to peer out across the way to the border since it seemed like her eyes had a way of burning his face when she watched him. And then, “quiet is good.” She wonders if he’ll laugh again, this time at her, because it should be obvious that being quiet is not one of her strengths. Instead she cocks a hind leg to settle in beside him, content to stay until the muscles strung so tight beneath his skin finally snap and carry him away again. “What things do you think about, Tobiah?” He must think about everything, he must be made from the constellations of thought with so much quiet to drown in.
But then he speaks again and she is encouraged by the flash of what looks like curiosity gleaming in the curve of his pale gold face. It doesn’t even bother her as much this time when he closes his eyes again to shut her out – it’s getting harder and harder to believe he means it, that it isn’t just a reflex from so much time on his own. “It was.” She says, though now it’s her turn to lapse into a somber silence that stretches on a few more seconds than is comfortable. “I never faced it though, I didn’t want to serve the kingdom like the rest of my family.” She pauses, chewing her lip in a thoughtful way. “And now the magic is gone, the scars are gone. It’s so strange.”
She sighs and turns to him again, her face soft and curious- though void of the easy smile that seemed to be etched permanently into the brown and white of her whiskered mouth. “My caves,” and this time the smile does flicker against her lips when she emphasizes the word my, "are where I go when I need quiet.” She steps closer, closing the distance between them to rest her nose against the pale gold and white of a neck knotted with mane. “But I don’t live in them.” She says this last bit gently, pointedly, because she doesn’t believe it’s good for him to be so used to being alone. They are not meant to be creatures of solitude.