BEXLEY BRIAR
A headache throbs deep in Bexley’s temples, and it is growing worse by the second. She feels it tap-tap-tapping against the inside of her skull with increasing force. It drills away at her, a kind of eating that turns her brain to pulp, turns her heart soft and painful - she is dizzy as she walks, head tucked to her chest, pulse pounding - the whole world is smoke and jasmine and something irredeemably dark, and then Florentine’s voice sounds, chiming in her head, and her throat tightens. Where is your fire -
Gods have mercy. Those words are a slap in the face when they hit her. Where is your fire, as if she hasn’t spent weeks searching for it, scraping her way up and down the desert with biblical devotion, looking for prophecies in wet tea leaves, as if her heart doesn’t ache for it even now, as if she doesn’t recognize acutely the lead that now lays in her bones and the coolness that freezes her veins and the way her nerves have been cut to blunt edges - where is your fire. Fuck off, says the evil thing inside her. And the good part says, It’s not her fault. Only yours.
She blinks, and realizes that they have stopped. In cool shadow the girls face each other now. Bexley feels her heart loud in her mouth and wills it to quiet. Blue eyes meet amethyst, and under those long lashes the Solterran’s anxiety is bold and clear to see, never mind how much she wishes she could hide it. Her lips part, but she can’t find words strong enough to break the air. Instead she stands there for a moment, staring, chin lifted, expression wavering, and focuses as hard as she can on fighting everything in her that is asking her to turn away.
I - her mouth twists into a hard frown. It -
And the words don’t come, they just can’t, and, at a loss for what to do, Bexley flicks the hair from her face and stands, trembling, with her scar on full display. It tingles up and down the length of her face, insistent in continuous suffering. Her pulse beats through the cut. She swallows the pain. What is more womanly than to be silent in your suffering, she thinks, and hot, sudden tears brim in those ice-blue eyes.
That. That’s it.
Her jaw grinds, grinds, grinds away the tension, but still it runs rampant in all the pathways of her body - that’s it, the problem, a few inches of raw skin, the pain that accompanies, the memory that flashes like gunfire across her mind every time she thinks back to the Canyons, to Solterra, to Seraphina looking down on her with pity. That’s it. So simple, and yet so incurable. Silent in your suffering, she reminds herself. Silent.
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