A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
If she is a torrent of feeling, an ocean of grief and of loneliness and of want, then Abel is a dead temple in the desert. Cool floors scoured smooth by sand, cool shadows waiting below a staring moon, only dust and bones and insects within.
Once, oh once, he had thought his feelings might swallow him whole - the sorrow and the rage and more than anything the way he didn’t understand. Why him, why his people, didn’t Caligo love them? Didn’t she watch them, didn’t they praise her, shouldn’t she keep them safe?
Was that not the whole reason for a god?
Now he knows there is no reason. Now he understands there is only knitting the darkness and chaos into a pattern you can use, one that keeps you fed and whole, and maybe that is why he follows Raum like a good dog.
While she hides he waits. Abel leans a little away, wary of the way cold seeps from her as from the last melting snowbank of spring, wanting that coolness and denying himself. Her eyes are luminous on him, her pale face stark against the shadows of the night. He, on the other hand, is nearly one with the shadows, save for the banding of his back and his legs like stripes of moonlight through iron bars.
He is glad to find the streets still quiet. Most listened to Raum, or maybe it was the monster at his back they obeyed; either way he is grateful they are alone. It makes it easier to meet her fever-bright eyes, easier to lean in to catch her whisper, frail and cold as a lace of frost that dissolves on his skin. We all have, he does not say. You will see more, he does not caution.
But when she pushes against him his dark lips curl back from his bright teeth. Abel does not care to be touched (Abel longs to be touched; he tries to forget the way his mother would rest her chin on his withers, would fold him into her embrace and how it would feel like a summer morning). Suddenly she is not a scared girl, not a fellow-orphan that might have been another hungry shadow running beside him in Denocte.
“Then I will take you somewhere else,” he says flatly, and all the ice in her gaze does nothing but make him cooler and more distant. She is taller than him but he doesn’t seem to care with the way he leans back against her, shoulder to ribs, and skates his teeth along her back. Abel stops thinking of anything but the road he must take to the prison, which has become a detention center, which keeps the unruly Solterrans from scheming rebellion in the dark. His gaze takes the eulogy of hers and swallows it up. Abel is always hungry, always lean.
”I can make you,” he says, but for the moment it takes the moon to pass beneath a field of cirrus clouds his gaze says don’t make me make you. Because of course it wouldn’t be Abel at all, it would be Raum, and the Ghost cared nothing for how a girl looked alone beneath the starlight, or how she felt like a breath of winter in the yawning expanse of the desert.
With a snap of his tail he presses against her, trying to push her, to turn her toward the heart of the city where a prison was also a shelter. At the same time (still with his feelings tucked away, like seeds beneath the frozen ground that would die if they were not hidden) he reaches for her ear, to take between his teeth, to remind her I can, I can, I can.
“Please don’t refuse,” he says, not quite whisper and not quite growl, but something low and soft with gravel in it.
He does not think about how he has no magic, how he is not tall or fearsome, how he has no horn or weapon with which to threaten. He has intent, and he has learned that sometimes that can be enough —
and if it isn’t there may be punishment waiting for them both.
@Evangelina
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