[private] you know you're gonna need to fight

[Selaphiel]

selaphiel

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

It is not difficult to chase the smile from his face, tenuous as it had been to begin with. He had expected it but his throat tightens all the same, every muscle in his body pulling taut in unison as he prepares to field her question. (Perhaps because he does not trust himself to be up to whatever she will ask of him, though he had promised he would be.) 

It feels like a swift kick to the gut -- her admission that she has plans to kill someone -- but he tries not to let his surprise register on his face. He has seen her kill before, but that had been a matter of his life or the dark thing’s, by the sound of it this is something premeditated and his nerves itch with a strange desire to wedge a sliver of space between them.

But he does not move.
Because she had saved his life.
Because he trusts her, regardless of what she is capable of.
Because she is his friend, maybe.

He watches her, quiet, blue eyes wide and discerning. The answer is simple, he knows. But he feigns consideration, as if doing so might somehow absolve her of any guilt she might feel. As if there is a chance that she will not have to shoulder all of the responsibility herself. As if he can make it easier.

The silence stretches between them a long moment before, finally, he draws in a breath and tries to break the news to her as gently as he can. As if she is the child, the fragile one, the one who needs protecting. “I wouldn’t know until you had your mind made up,” he tells her and there is an edge of genuine sorrow in his tone because he cannot help her, not the way she’d hoped that he might be able to. It is a burden she will have to shoulder alone.

“I cannot sense someone’s death until their fate has already been decided, I’m sorry.”

I just bite my tongue a bit harder

@[Mazikeen]