[open] oh, fire away, any

[Selaphiel]

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

Selaphiel has never known peace and it is no surprise that he does not find it here. (There is some approximation of quiet, certainly, as he drags in as much of this half-clean air as he can. As if he has been drowning and this is his only hope of survival.) 

He notices her just as she notices him, but he knows better than to try to make friends. He feels no overwhelming urge to approach her, to smile, to acknowledge that he has seen her at all. That he has cast some cursory glance across those sunset feathers and acknowledged that she is a thing that has come to Beqanna from the sky. (This, an incorrect assumption, but he has no way of knowing that.) He does not call out to her in greeting, only turns those eyes away. (If it is rude, dismissive, cold, then it is all of those things but this is the only way he can protect himself, you see.)

It is only when she ventures close enough to speak that he turns his focus back to her. (And there, as always, is the faint stench of Death. He understands that whatever it is is the remnants of their war, Stratos, Baltia, a war that he is only aware of through snippets of secondhand stories.) He exhales.

If he had been someone else entirely, he might have laughed. He might have blushed and turned away, coy. He might have shaken his head and found some great amusement in her appraisal. Instead, he blinks. (Perhaps he had forgotten that he is an angel when he feels so much like a devil. Angels are good, he’d thought. And he is… 

He is?
Not good, certainly. But what does that leave?)

He studies her a long moment, noting the Baltian eyes, how they betray no emotion. A pulse of quiet passes between them and, finally, he shakes his head.

“I’m not much of an angel,” he says. He glances again at the horizon, noting then that her feathers reflect the color. What a strange magic, he thinks. “No more an angel than you are, I suppose.” 

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder

@Raea