01-29-2022, 08:35 PM
I'll settle for the ghost of you.
If she objects to the nickname he had bestowed upon her, it doesn’t show. She is quick to quirk a brow and laugh, reminding him of raindrops on wildflower petals, and quicker still to remain coy. He watches the way her lilac mane falls in waves along her neck but it is only a glance, his true focus still on her illuminated expression. Trying to read between the lines of her. There is a thread here and he snatches the end of it, unwilling to let it go so easily. “So you admit you have a habit of being attracted to dangerous behaviors.” His voice is curious but there is a sharpness in his gaze. And something else… Something that almost looks like hurt which he quickly hides behind a wall of lengthy crimson forelock.Aela had always tried to show him options, that even if he was destined to be terrible, it didn’t have to be in the way he had always assumed it would be. The way it had been spitted at him at birth. Despite the fire that he wields, the souls (which could absolutely be malevolent at times) he summoned, he had never wanted to be considered as something bad. Evil. The memory of being shunned in the Adoption Den had never left him. The terrified looks. Too abnormal. Too strange. Despite the friends he had made since then like Lies and Sickle, the confidence his adoptive mother had painstakingly built into him, there was always that small voice in the back of his head that reminded him that no matter just how good he could be… The core of him was terrible. Dangerous. That same voice that coaxed him to burst a bird into flames just to see if he could. The same voice that had moments ago wondered what it would be like to see her skin curl and peel. And it seems Lillibet had sussed that out in him immediately.
Tossing his own dark red mane, he turns his own gleaming eyes out into the cold desert darkness just as she begins to search his gaze. Her words eventually bring him back to her and there is a solemness there, a hard resolve. He still isn’t sure what he can do here, what he can offer her or this place. Her motive for being here, though, is parallel to his own. Where else would Aela go if she was still alive? “And if I refuse?” He asks her quietly but as perceptive as she has been so far, he’s sure she already knows his answer is a resounding yes. If he was as dangerous as so many had thought or wondered and the stories of Pangea were true... Then it was only a matter of time before he ended up here anyways.
FYR
@Lillibet