five story fire when you came
love is a losing game
love is a losing game
Ha! When he offers to take her inside Bexley can’t help but contend it. (In her own city, too!) It’s a bursting kind of giggle, a laugh of knowingness and distrust pulled from her entirely by surprise, and, more subtly, something like indignancy. Some part of her might be offended were she not so distracted by the blooming heat of his shoulder pressed to hers, and the way they seem to be the only warmth in the universe, and the loud hummingbird heartbeat in her chest, so insistently fierce even when everything else is quiet and strange and dull, drowned-out by the snow around them -
Nothing with him has ever been dull. She doubts it ever will be.
She watches the amber in his eyes like it might reveal something hidden for centuries, an old mosquito trapped in orange rock or the years-old version of her heart that hasn’t yet been scarred. It is a a place she knows she could spend millennia looking through and still not fully understand and somehow that is more romantic than anything, that even a year and a half after their first meeting on the slope of the Arma Mountains neither of them is any less unknowable, neither changed, neither any more moral or kindly or empathetic.
They are as bitter as they were the day they met. What else is there to love?
She wears a fuzzy kind of smile as their eyes meet, naive and sheepishly sweet. On anyone else it would be entirely dulcet. On her it reads too good to be true.
I’m glad you’re keeping your promises, Bexley answers finally, half-serious and half-smirking, and with that turns down the alley and presses her first hoof print into the snow.
@acton
