Abysm is staring and knows that he should look away but doesn’t. There is something about the eyes and the facial expression that he focuses intently upon. Is it her? Probably not but he is still minutely hopeful that it could be. That one day he’ll just be able to walk right up to her in this world instead of the next and there she’ll be, looking him with eyes dark and doelike that shine full of love for him and only him. But it seems like it is too much to hope for. Too much to long for that the longing is just as bad as the knowledge that it could all just be a dream.
He’s good at manipulating those so that’s very likely. Abysm might just have manipulated himself a lover that never existed but is made up of the bits and pieces of the mares he meets in moments like these. The ones that are sweet and sad all at the same time. Like he’s drawn to the sorrow threaded into and around their hearts in thorny grasps. Perhaps it is because he’s looking for all the things he ought to have found in his mother but doesn’t see, cannot find, and will never know because he refuses to let her close. Getting close is what causes the hurt as childish as that seems, so he pushes her away even though he finds himself looking for more and more of her little queenly lover with the soft azure wings.
But her gaze pulls him back in. Not dark. Not doelike. But he finds something indescribable in it just as he does in the smile that comes softly and slowly to her face. He had found her beautiful from the first moment his eyes befell her but now, as she blossoms into all manner of welcome and niceness, she becomes even more beautiful. Still nothing like the one in his dreams that haunts him, whose eyes follow every curve of muscle along his bones. Not like the way she looks at him and finds all the places that are put together crooked and still growing. Until her voice tugs at him, and the small boy from the abyss lifts a hand inside his dark empty soul to the piece of sunlight that dares to shine there.
“Leliana…” he repeats back to her. Even her name sounds as lyrical as the voice that delivered it. How can she not believe she isn’t beautiful? Of course he doesn’t know this but something in her mannerism hints at it; hints at a slow and careful shyness not so unlike the one he used to use to keep others at bay. Not that he thinks that is the case here, she is approachable enough whereas he had not always been so. He’s more lost nowadays than anything else. Lost or just absent. Gone off into his dreams and not even the dreams of others are enough to keep him away from the things he dreams up for them to do and see.
Next his eyes focus on her wings and how they’re shifting to mimic the champagne and foam of his fur. Then they bleed back to sunset red which is a very color on her, he thinks. But then his thoughts are always getting in the way. She sighs and that is his cue to help along the stumbling conversation, and probably tell her his name. So he does;
“Abysm.” he says flatly.
It’s as if the name says it all for him - Abysm, abyss, nothingness.
His eyes never leave her; they might stray from face to wing to hip but they never look at anything else around them.
@[leliana] <3
i would do anything for love,
but i won’t do that