i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
If what he asked is cruel, he doesn’t realize it. The concept of cruelty is something he has paid little attention to, though he has seen enough of it by now. It’s an odd fact of life, but when those who do it purposefully are relatively few in number, it’s hard to see it as anything more than a vagary of emotion. Or as anything beyond a fight for survival. Even the monsters he had understood. They had been doing all that they knew. Is it cruel if they were unable to be anything but what they had been?
So when he stares at her with eyes full of knowledge no one his age should possess, it is not with dark intentions.
She agrees, and a smile touches Reave’s expressive lips. He says nothing, but his eyes gleam with a strange light in the moments before he pulls her into the maelstrom of his own emotional memories. It is an almost primal thing, but when his first memories had been pain, it almost has to be. He hadn’t quite understood them then, but he does now. He knows there is grief in his confusion as the memories of his first moments surge between them. Some are his and some are his mothers’ (the both of them), but it hardly matters. There is a boy (him, newly born, red and white and gangly limbs with no hint of bone) and there is the woman who had birthed him.
Her last breath had shuddered and a crack had spread through Lilli’s heart. He had felt it as his own, though he hadn’t known then that it had been shared. There is pain in that grief, pain enough that it almost feels as though he would splinter from the inside out. Pain that spreads even as the stone spreads across Brazen’s still form. Pain that burns as the small nose of a newborn colt presses desperately against the cold, hard shoulder. As though he might still nudge her awake.
When he withdraws, shaking the memory free, his eyes are flat and cold. As though that alone could shield him from what lay in his past. There is more, but he is not ready to awaken that beast yet.
When he has finally shaken the miasma from his thoughts, he peers at her with a quizzical eye, though there is something more dangerous lurking alongside it now. “Have you felt that kind of hurt before?” he asks abruptly, refusing to linger. Still, there is genuine curiosity in his voice. “Or are you numb to that too?”
reave
@[camellia]