that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
It had always been a little too easy to get under Mazikeen’s skin. A little too easy to prod her into action—push her into reacting. He isn’t sure what it is about her that pushes him away from the easy persona that he usually likes to wear. What encourages him to act so cruel and biting, but he cannot deny that there is a part of her that gets under his skin too. Something about her seeing him perhaps a little too clearly. Seeing what lies beneath the facade of him and seeing it for the fake, cheap thing that it always was.
Still, he holds onto it today.
Her anger settles him, soothes in him in a way—as though he could distract her with annoyance so that she did not look too closely at him again. His lips spread into a lazy smile, something a little too similar to the father who raised him, and his golden ears perk toward her amongst the brambles of his wild mane.
“I don’t think I believe you,” he drawls with that same cool smile, holding himself far enough away that she could not reach him with tooth and claw—at least not quickly. “But I appreciate the lie all the same.” He winks just as she calls him out for his own penchant for falsehoods and he laughs, ignoring the shiver of being discovered that races up his spine. If only she knew, he thinks, of all the lies that he has told.
But she doesn’t, he reminds himself.
She couldn’t.
So he just shrugs. “I have always been full of tricks, if you knew where to look.” Not entire true, but not entirely wrong either. Could he call the curse a trick? Gods, he wish that he could. It would have been so much easier to swallow if it had only been a trick of the light. “What trick would you like to see today?”
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
