Where Elio is rigid in his morality, Darkling bends like the boughs of a willow. Whether there is anything he would truly consider immoral is yet to be determined. After all, he had not yet found the limit. But, as is the nature of young colts, Darkling cannot help but to push boundaries. Especially if those boundaries belonged to another.
The red and gold boy is clearly discomfited by his rather obvious lack of compunction. And that, rather than instilling any sort of forbearance, serves only to provoke him further. Of course, Elio’s inability to control the wild flux of his influencing emotion does not help either. Darkling, for all his wiles, has yet to encounter such a power, and as a result, has no recognition of the external influence. Indeed, his own emotions are already unstable enough, those foreign impressions are just as easily mistaken as his own.
Agitation, frustration, surprise, excitement. Fleeting and unidentifiable to the young Darkling, who has never before had need to closely monitor his own emotions. Padding the edges of his own amusement and dark urges.
Truthfully, he hadn’t expected a genuine response to his flippant and question, so when Elio offers one, he tilts his head curiously, examining his companion anew. “How so?” he counters casually, dark eyes glinting with an unnameable light. “I control them. They would only hurt someone if I wished them to.” A faint, speculative grin begins to curl his lips at that. “Would that make me terrible? If I chose to do nothing good with it?”
He doesn’t bother answering the second question. Instead he draws a thin tendril of darkness from his skin where the snake had disappeared. He does not use it to shape anything recognizable, instead allowing it to curl and twist abstractly in the air.
After all, power is neither good nor bad. It is all in the user. And Darkling rather had to wonder if Elio had the gumption to admit he questions the user’s goodness rather than the power’s. As if good and evil were two sides of a coin rather than a continuum of endless gray.
you're burning up the sky, you're a constellation
I think that I could die for this revelation