five story fire when you came
love is a losing game
love is a losing game
When the warmth seeps out of the day it goes slowly, then all at once. The sky bruises deep and dark; shadows stretch long and bitter down the length of the alley; all at once the world is the darkest kind of silver it can be without turning black, gelid and oppressive. It is a deep freeze kind of chill. It frosts Bexley’s skin metallic, crunches deep into her curls, freckles her lips like so much starlight.
(Where does it hurt? Well, everywhere - )
Her teeth chatter as they draw to a stop under the limelight of the storm. In the absence of everything Bexley’s heart is a sick kind of flame, sputtering weakly inside her chest. It hurts to swallow that kind of pulse. A breeze howls overhead, rustles the Regent’s icy white hair until it almost seems to crackle. Some part of her almost wants to cry, and she knows if she does she knows she could just blame it on the wind. I mean -
And when their eyes meet, the cold in her chest almost ebbs away, as if it were about to be replaced by the too-intense longing of a shipwreck, a lighthouse, a lost magic. (And again it isn’t. But the feeling that it might is almost good enough.)
His Majesty dumb-fuck took my powers away, she finishes, but whatever. The word seems foreign, almost, in her mouth. It is a lame kind of digression from Bexley’s forever-hereditary anger. Still in the cold it seems kind of apt, in the same way that the ice in her eyes or the dead casualty of her sloping shoulders do not feel out of the place in the biting winds and frost, because (and Gods help anyone who thinks otherwise) she is nothing if not adaptable. If the sun burns so will she, and if the world is cold she can be too - she has to grin a little when she says out loud the next petty thing that comes to mind, Though it seems he’s finding his own magic a little unusable, huh?
She tilts her head to the black sky and watches it, as if He might be listening. Though he never has before.
But she is listening when Acton speaks again, and what he says makes her heart crumple in her chest with all the force of a coal crushed to diamonds, hitches her breath in her throat so forcefully it sends a pain into her lungs, sets her skin to a tone-deaf kind of buzzing that hums in her ear like the dark violet sound of honeybees. All at once the edges of the world crumple inward, a paper crane folding its wings to land. It hurts to breathe. Bexley slashes him with a look of righteous doubt, pitching in place slightly. The blue of her eyes is increasingly garish against the whiteness of the world around them and she can feel that vibrancy burning all the way back into her head, that void singing back to her in a slew of white noise.
I don’t know if I believe you, Bexley mumbles. Still her heart sings a strange wanting song against her ribs, wild and unsettling, and still her gaze is horribly soft. The warm breath on her neck almost melts her from the outside, and then she is nothing but a girl again, wanton, unsatisfied, deeply uncertain. But if you’re sure -
She watches the first snowflake fall (with a religious kind of reverence, even), but only as it comes to settle on Acton’s skin: what else is worth watching?
@acton
