Acton found Delumine pretty the way a painting was pretty: lovely, colorful, a little soft, too perfect once you really stepped up to study it. The shadows here were not for hiding, and no eye he met carried the kind of glint that promised a brawl.
It should have been peaceful, a good place for healing. Instead it made the buckskin restive, his skin itching with the need to do something. Anything. To fight, to fuck, to practice the more…disruptive of his tricks. He could be himself no better here than he could from behind the Raven Gate, and it ate and ate at him. Acton was a bomb and the wick was burning fast.
It was in his interest, or maybe the interests of the greater good, for him to step away for a moment and collect himself.
He wasn't surprised to find he was not the only one seeking a little solitude, but he did not expect his companion to be Sabine. He was so used to seeing her as a shadow at Raum’s side, or Rhos’s - he was not used to seeing her expression so unguarded. For a moment he only watched her, wondering at how at peace she looked, there in the slanting sunlight and the wildflowers that nodded in the breeze.
Almost he slipped away in silence, but Acton was a selfish creature: he wanted a piece of that rare smile for himself.
“You have your father’s reluctance to join a party, I see,” he said wryly, but he wore a grin that was almost soft as he stepped over to lip at her forelock. When he straightened again it was with a sigh, and the sun rolled warm across his burnished skin as he cast his gaze across the festival.
Unlike Sabine, it did not make him want to smile, but he kept his in place anyway. It was a good forgery, but it only touched his amber eyes when he looked back at her.
“You look radiant,” he told her, and then pursed his lips in mock-seriousness. “Except…” Acton cocked his head as if considering, and then with a flourish he conjured a daisy, pale as new sunlight, from the air. It was only an illusion, and wouldn’t last for long – but what flowers ever did, anyway? “Here,” he said, and tucked the bloom just behind her ear. “I won’t be the only boy to offer you a flower today, but I can at least be the first.”
@
these violent delights have violent ends
