06-04-2021, 01:50 PM
selaphiel
This is a new kind of glow.
An altogether different sun. It is a light that lives in his chest, a warmth that splinters outward from the very center of him. How shy the smile that creeps across his face as he follows her toward the hills and how valiant his efforts to hide it.
They walk together in silence and he feels no anxious urge to fill it up. Perhaps they are friends. Perhaps, in this way, he can be useful to her. As someone who can walk beside her and feel no need to fill the quiet with nonsense, someone simply to be there.
After several moments, she speaks and he tilts his head in her direction but does not turn his gaze on her. (He knows that the ice blue of it can be unsettling, how glacial it is, how pointed.) Instead, he watches the earth unfold before them and thinks of his sister, of the children growing in her swollen barrel. The news is not delivered in the way he might have expected. She does not share it with a tone of unbridled enthusiasm, but with something more subdued. It is this that draws his gaze to her.
He does not speak, only watches her face as she gathers her thoughts. And then, finally, the confession. And everything comes crashing into place. So suddenly that it kicks all of the air out of his chest. For a moment he thinks that it is the pain in her voice when she says it that casts the shroud, but the dust soon settles and it becomes abundantly, devastatingly clear that this is not the case at all.
She is not looking at him but he cannot tear his eyes away from her.
Eyes that fill suddenly with tears as the smell pools in his nostrils.
“Maze,” he whispers, voice trembling.
And he cannot bring himself to take another step.
He stops and he hopes that she will, too.
He stops and he hopes that she will look back at him.
“Maze,” he says, a little bit louder, begging her to look at him.
And when she does, he does not bother to blink the tears out of his eyes.
Because he knows and he had so wanted to be useful to her.
“He will kill you,” he whispers, voice shaking.
Because he does not know any other way to tell her.
I just bite my tongue a bit harder
@[Mazikeen]