"It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be."
Something dark unfurls in him, like an oil stain on water, for her boldness. It spools beneath this skin like a disease and drips down into the marrow of his bones. He swallows down that thing in him that loves the wild, fearless siren in her, and pretends that the curl of her breath, like smoke against his throat, only makes him feel nothing but shallow appreciation.
Veer pretends that he doesn't want to unfurl his feathers like a universe and swallow her and her ribbons whole like they are nothing more than a fading star before the black hole of him.
At his side Najjad shakes his feathers in the moonlight like a lazy lion might shake their mane before a feast caught by a lioness. A thread of some nameless, deep thing passes between the two males and neither has a name for it. Caution, one thinks. Now, now, now, the other chants. Neither of them move a single hoof or paw.
She sheds blue slick like Veer sheds gold and feathers. Part of him wants to drape her in rubies and pearls just so that he could pluck them off one buy one until she doesn't notice that it's skin he's taking instead of gifts. Another part, when he listens to her voice and almost laughs, wants something so very, very different than skin and pearls and wealth.
Veer swallows all that down too when her ribbons brush against his like frail snakes. He only watches her with a heady sort of focus as she wraps her teeth around the metal and pulls. And if he blinks away some shadow across his eyes who is to say that it's more than a trick of moonlight against his golden gaze?
“No.” He offers his denial as gracefully as a sword swung by a master of war. “That is not better at all.” This time he is the one to move past her, a slow influx of feathers and grace. Each arrogant curl of him offers promise and threat. He moves more like a lion than Najjad could.
And when he's close enough to wraps his teeth around the stem of the rose and pulls. The thorns cut at his lips and when he swallows he can taste the iron and ichor of his blood on his tongue. It's a bitter sort of sting and he relishes in the way that even as it dies the rose still fights.
Casually he moves back towards her and goes to tuck the rose into her mane, hoping that maybe the thorns snag and pull just enough to remind her of a feral thing fighting against a cage. “No wild animal belongs in the dirt.” Only then does he let his feathers unfurl until he's a beast of the sky and it's painfully obvious there is not a cage in all of Novus that could hold him.
Veer is no rose but, he thinks, she could be.
@Euryale
