b e x l e y
oh honey darling, i'd love to kill you, load up my shotgun, you kill me too -
T
here is nothing like love in Bexley’s gaze, when she looks at Seraphina.Nothing like anything.
For the first time in her existence she is really, truly dead. Asleep. Extinct. Insensate. For a girl who was born foaming at the mouth, who knows apathy about as well as she knows God (which is to say not at all) it is utterly horrifying. It is the first time she has ever been truly quiet. In the light, Solterran sun shines through her dull, pale eyes and turns them to sea glass so clear and still it is nauseating, if not almost demonic.
There is nothing to say. Or too much, but it’s all impossible. Even though she manages that dry, casual quip, it takes all of her energy. It drains from her like a brain bleed. Even breathing has started to hurt. She feels salt start to encrust the corners of her mouth, and cannot be sure if it is tears, or sweat, or dark, dry blood. The canyon howls with toothy wind; it sprays the back of her legs with red dust, rusting the gold there until, underneath, it could be nothing prettier than unkempt steel. Even the bleached white of her hair is streaked now with thin slashes of dirty crimson. She is a ghost. Not the Ghost, Raum has beaten her even at that - but a ghost, nonetheless.
Seraphina speaks. It makes her brain hurt. It sounds like a long-forgotten memory. Like a day she has managed to scoop from a time like this that happened years ago. Her ear twitches, and she leans forward; as much as the sound pains her, it is still easy. The familiarity is a comfort.
Then it registers fully.
Raum, says Seraphina, and it is word enough to turn Bexley off from the conversation completely. Her heart stops. Her body, again, is a vessel for rage and trauma and terror. She glowers, her lip curls: the hair across her spine bristles: for a brief moment something violent and totally exanimate flashes in her eyes, and then they are black again, truly dead and not just undead, and if any tears form they are blinked away faster than they become visible.
Bexley turns to leave. Blood is pouring, pouring and rushing in her ears so loud that she cannot hear anything else, so fast that it turns her vision black, and she does turn her back, at least, but does not make it more than a few strides before her foolish, bitter heart drags her back. She stops in place. Her head snaps suddenly and violently, like a seizure. The rest of her body follows.
She faces the ex-queen from a few strides farther away: coldly, and with discontent.
Acton, says Seraphina, and the little girl inside of Bexley wants to say: you don’t have the right to use his name like that. Or: whatever it is, don’t tell me. Or: he’s not really dead, is he?
Of course she says nothing, because to hear it would only be another heartbreak, and she is not so sure her heart can handle another one: even if he is alive, if, if (she still says if, knowing it is stupid and impossible), the whiplash might be fatal for her.
I’m sorry, says Seraphina, and all at once the tears begin to pour from her like a river.
Don’t, she warns. Say that. Don’t, don’t, don’t. She heaves for breath now against the immense tightness in her chest. It hurts, everything hurts, and Bexley would have traded her life for either one of theirs but neither of them will ever get to know it, and the emotion that overcomes her - sorrow, fury, total heartache - is so intense that, unbidden, light starts to mix with her tears and pour from her eyes, then her nostrils, then her mouth.
When she hears the sizzle of her magic hitting the ground, she startles. Then turns it off like a switch.
Bexley repeats: Don’t say that. Instead, she offers, blue eyes bright with tears, voice wavering in the new heat, trembling like a fawn, Kill him. Or I will.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3
