take my hand. feel my heart.
tell me what's wrong with it.
tell me what's wrong with it.
H
er voice drifts towards him like a siren’s crooning melody, soft and low and lovely. The pain that had lodged itself like a bullet in his brain fades to a distant memory, the callous demand he’d flung at her feet like shrapnel forgotten in the lull of her lips. Caine is not at all sorry for asking Moira such a question. Though, when the girl had thrown a withering glare at him for his impetuousness, he’d wished, with an inward sigh, he’d at least phrased it better. Only a second. It had taken only a second for the boy to lose all grasp on himself, to flounder like a drowning seabird. Intolerable. Agenor would’ve had him by the throat if he had seen.
It had been a moment of weakness that Caine will not let happen again.
Black wings droop like wilting stems as he listens silently to her unraveling tale, the muscles of his jaw drawing taut as her recollections of horror stir his own chest of bloodthirsty demons. Burns. Chains. Terror. The memories are uncomfortably familiar, clinging to his skin like stale breath until the air in the room turns sour. Anguish rolls off the phoenix girl in suffocating waves, until he can no longer overlook the tremble in her delicate chin, the fog stifling those flame-colored eyes.
Moira looks at him with the light of a dying sun, and Caine’s eyes drift, as steely as silver coins, towards the wings she so hates. The wings she so grieves. “Your turn,” she whispers like a goddess defeated, and his stomach turns in agitation. No.
He has never seen her look so weak, not even when he had frightened her, and Caine will not stand for it. Even if she ends up hating him, cursing him to the ends of the earth, he will not allow her to cage herself with the shadows of the past, to let the demons roost.
Because he knows better than anyone, that once there — they will never leave.
“But you are not with them anymore, are you?” He begins, leaning towards her with a frustration as foreign to him as it is to her. “You are here, Moira, and they cannot touch you. They cannot reach you.” Agenor’s chains will never bind me again. Never. His tone is harsh, his accent no longer lyrical, yet he does not care. They are well past pleasantries — not that he’d ever offered them — and if Moira had truly hated him, she would’ve left before the moon had crested.
“What better retribution than to learn to use those wings you so condemn? To fly high into the clouds, where they can never dream of going. To make them choke on their regret like they choked you.” Above them, the crane flaps its paper wings so hard they tear, and it falls in a spiral down, down, down. He does not even look at it as it lands, broken, on the table.
“I can teach you.” The words are out before he hears himself, silver eyes as molten as when she had kissed him. “I was not born with two sets of wings, if you must know,” Caine mutters, and it is the closest thing to a confession she will hear from him tonight.
“Flight. Cranes. Both of these things” — a smile tiptoes like a thief across his lips as a sheet of paper slides to a stop in front of her — “I can teach you.”
@Moira | "speaks" | notes: mo's story has definitely gotten to caine, though he's trying hard not to let it show too much
