Golden eyes watching our every move
Losing time without the sun or moon
She’d closed him out, and he doesn’t know why. He’d tried to understand, but he cannot. He has never been very good at seeing and knowing, at recognizing what lay beneath the surface. Not like his sister, who could look at another and know their soul. He’d almost asked her, but he hadn’t. He’d felt too foolish, as though he doesn’t even know his own mind. If he does not know his own, how could he expect to understand another?
But he had stayed close. He couldn’t seem to help himself. The shadows wrap so comfortingly around him, ancient friends that always welcome him in their cool embrace, no matter how far he might stray. They are simple and constant, easy to understand. They do not place a vice around his heart and run rough fingers through his mind, scrambling his thoughts until he is not entirely sure he had remembered things correctly.
He’d tried to go to her at first. Quickly though (too quickly), it had become clear she had not wished to see him. She had avoided the shadows, the darkness and the quiet corners that he calls his own. Had he been less uncertain, he might have braved the light. Might have ignored the way it burns his skin and pierces his eyes just to speak with her. But this is too new to him, still too foreign. Sometimes he wonders if he even knows up from down. Sometimes he wonders if he had only been imagining things. Perhaps what they had shared had only been in his head.
Still he watches, keeping to his shadows, unseen, undetectable, hoping that perhaps he’d been wrong. It’s easier in the night, when darkness abounds and shadows touch nearly every piece of land and not just the depths of the forest. He sees her nightmares, pieces of himself dying just a little bit each time he must watch knowing he cannot interfere. She hadn’t wished to see him, and he would respect her wishes, even when it hurt to do so.
He made sure she was never in danger. That much at least, he could do. That much he could give without her knowing.
He is there tonight too, when the nightmare takes hold. He aches as he watches her, resisting the urge to step from his shadows. To draw her close and take away her fears. He would battle her demons if he could. He’d fought the monsters of nightmares in the past and won. He would gladly do so again, if it gave her peace. But it’s not his place.
She’s not his. Not really. Not anymore.
He stills when his name escapes her lips, almost not daring to believe she had asked for him. Why now? Why tonight?
The answer to those questions doesn’t seem to matter though. He would always be there if she asked. After a moment, he releases the veil he’d used to shield himself. The shadow-dark pitch of his skin blends so perfectly into the night that, to the observer, it might appear as if nothing had changed. Only the bright, golden-yellow sheen of his gaze would give any indication of his presence, peering eerily from the darkness.
For a moment, he can only stare at her, his heart thudding inside his chest as emotion clogs his throat. Finally, he whispers her name. “Briseis.” Barely a thread of sound, almost indiscernible from the trembling notes of the music made by nocturnal creatures.
ether