He should have expected her short, sharp answers, maybe even shouldn’t be surprised by the smile she wields with all the expertise of a blade. Yet Acton couldn’t figure it, couldn’t square it away with the Isra he knew - the storyteller, the healer, the queen. Clear in his mind was her with the lightning crackling overhead, with a goddess at her back, with a flock of monsters held rapt by her words.
Maybe that was why it stung so badly, why he felt as though he were the one waylaid in a dark alley. No need for her to wish her words were blades; he felt them like a punch to the gut anyhow. He still has not asked how she got away - the magic she performed now, satin to steel and a flower to a blade, suggested enough. He felt sick, and proud, and more sick; he didn’t know what to do, what to say. Acton was not made for fixing things.
But he knew a dismissal when he heard one.
He looked at her once more in silence, the way the moonlight loved the blade of her horn, the hard plane of her cheek. Darkness pooled in her sea-colored eye and darkness crept between them, hand in hand with silence.
The buckskin wanted to tell her he understood - but it would be a lie.
His violence was a different beast altogether - a riot, a wildfire, an eruption. It was a molotov cocktail, a struck match tossed into a barrel of gunpowder. It was quick and hot and chaotic and then it was over. Acton did not understand the fury that moved below the dark of her skin, that made her cold and remote as an old dead star.
It was not a difference he knew how to breach.
And so he did nothing to break the grim silence between them, or try to quiet the frigid waves of her wrath. Like a reprimanded dog he looked toward the door as it melted to ribbons and magic, and his ears were back but he walked toward it anyway. Acton only stopped once, his heart a tightening fist, that undirected anger like a bed of nails he kept sinking further into.
“You will be okay, though,” he said softly, standing at the door, looking over his shoulder at her with his wild hair dark as the silk behind him. He didn’t say it like a lie - he said it like a promise. And then he turned away, and though his steps were measured he still knew he was fleeing like a chastised street urchin, like the boy he had been - but he couldn’t bear to watch her another moment. Not with that cruel counterfeit smile, not with the necklace of red she wore, not with the way she wouldn’t look at him at all.
Acton could hardly draw a breath until he was spilling out into the night again, stars overhead and bonfires below, and then he swore every filthy curse he knew in a stream into the air. Even Reichenbach would have blushed to hear it.
Then he turned toward the edge of town, and the mountains beyond, and a cave he knew was haunted by a certain Ghost.
@Isra
