— I'll break you a hundred different ways —
When he angles his head, his eyes find her. She is red and ivory against the blue of the waves and sky, and he wonders how he had missed her before. There is a fleeting glint of irritation at finding his solitude has been disturbed, and of course it doesn’t occur to him that this is likely her home, and it is not his. Nearly a lifetime alone has left him selfish and apathetic. The ill feeling settles like lead in his veins, heavy and uncomfortable at having someone nearby when he had not been expecting it.
He swings his face back to the horizon, away from her direction, but the thoughtful expression he had previously worn is replaced with something much more tense. It shows in the clench of his jaw and the way his muscles grow taut beneath his dapple skin, his wings pulling tightly against his sides. Rarely is he interested in conversation, and there was a reason he had landed in what he had (wrongfully) assumed was a quiet area. With hardly a sideways glance, though, the red of her coat is still visible in his peripheral, and he realizes that she is, apparently, not leaving.
He moves then, pivoting almost abruptly, and he walks parallel to the waves that roll across the shore. It would have been easy to simply fly off, but part of him was mildly curious about the girl in the sea.
Her image becomes more clear as he draws closer, and it is only then that he realizes that what had seemed like white markings from a distance was actually bone erupting through her skin.
It’s enough to make him stop, to regard her with such interest that he almost cannot mask it. He hardly notices the antlers that twist from her head, and he is not close enough to appreciate the sea green color of her eyes. But he sees the irritated skin that lines every place that bone has emerged, and it reminds him of when night fell and his own skin and muscle would rot and erode, until he was stripped to just a skeleton. They were, in a sense, completely opposite. Where his skin fell away to reveal the bone, hers was being overtaken by it. He cannot help but to wonder what it would be like to trace the lines where she bled, if she would flinch beneath such a touch.
He realizes then that the silence has been stretching between them, broken only by the waves as they rippled across the sands. “I thought I was alone,” His voice is cool and flat, much like the stare of his dark brown eyes, before he adds with barely half of a smile, “My apologies for intruding.” Even though he is not sorry at all.
— and I'll make you remember my face —
Excuse you. Just, EXCUSE. YOU. <3