Brinly
She exhales a short laugh at his comment, a wry sort of smile twisting through the flames on her lips. “I have always been on fire, you just couldn’t see it.” She had warned him, she was sure of it; had warned him not to touch her, but she wasn't sure if he had understood why. Her appearance back then had been plain and unassuming, just a simple bay girl with smoldering eyes and a tongue that was too sharp. Their encounter had been charged with so much anger at themselves as well as each other that it would not surprise her if he had taken the warning as an insult—that she was telling him that she did not want him, specifically, to touch her— rather than understanding she was only trying to protect him.
The possibility of a misunderstanding had haunted her in the days following their interaction, but in the end it had not mattered, because their paths did not seem destined to ever cross again. Which was for the best, she had told herself. Even if somewhere beneath the poison they tried so hard to sink into each other there was an echo of want, it was an impossible, unattainable thing—she would never be something that he, or anyone else, could hold onto, and it was easier to let herself pretend she preferred it that way.
“Just passing through, but depending on how this goes my plans could change,” the forced lightness to her tone only serves to strengthen the tightening in her chest, amplifying the feeling that something is trying to pry it open. She isn’t sure why she had thought she could coerce a facade of casual indifference in front of him, and she thinks if it weren’t for the glowing flames that flickered across her face he would be able to see right through. Perhaps he still can.
Her firelit eyes remain focused on his face, wishing that he didn’t look just as she remembered; wishing that maybe her memory had painted him in a better light, that seeing him again would show her he was not something she would have wanted anyway.
The bitterness that blooms across her tongue when she is forced to recognize that he is unchanged and still something she could never have is undeniable, and it shows in the tight set of her jaw and the way her dark eyes glint with a resolved hardness.
“How have you been?” the question should have been a casual one, but instead the words are sharp in a way that is almost accusatory, as if she is daring him to admit that he is fine. Daring him to offer her the knife to cut herself, to have to hear him say that his life is perfect while hers has done nothing but fall apart, and maybe then it will be easier to hate him.
— if i’m on fire, you’ll be made of ashes too —
@brigade