chasing down the devil
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
In a way the collision is a relief. At the moment of impact all thoughts of his mother - all thoughts of anything - rush from his head in the same manner that his breath is forced from his lungs.
Alas, it is not such a beneficial thing for his knees and ribs and basket of bread.
He had been frozen, head up, ears forward, searching searching searching, and had hardly heard the clatter of her hooves or the rush of her breathing over the intensity of his concentration. August is only just aware of a presence coming very quickly toward him before they meet, and then it is all a blur of hooves knocking against hocks and something hard and sharp glancing across the skin of his neck and a bright, muscular, warm body rather violently and intimately entangled with his own.
August is hardly aware of his squeal, except to be grateful later that nobody from the Scarab was within earshot. Only his years of training keep him upright, but it is a narrow thing, and when at last the world is still again but for their breath pouring quick and silver from their mouths he runs a quick inventory - nothing broken, nothing sprained, minor scraping, a little blood on his coat and a lot of bread on the snow. His body eases in relief.
“Not mortally,” he says with a laugh bit between his teeth like a silver coin, and finishes the careful work of disentangling himself from her. Then, at last, he is able to look her in the face.
He finds a stranger - a striking one, one that he’d remember having seen before. She smells a little of the salt of sweat and the sea-breeze, and the look in her crimson eyes is genuine concern (and mortification). August feels a grin crease his cheek. “Usually when I’m attacked it’s intentional. Are you alright?” With a practiced eye he sweeps his silver-eyed gaze across her, looking for the same injuries he’d searched himself for. Satisfied when he finds nothing serious, he meets her eye again, for the moment leaving his belongings where they lay in the scuffed-up snow.
Whatever he’d been about to say is lost when a crow peals a throaty laugh, and he remembers the reason for his distraction. His name, spoken so clearly he would swear it wasn’t said in his imagination alone.
Well, he may as well ask, even as he shares a piece of her embarrassment in the doing. “Do you - ah - know me?”
@boudika | I love her So Much
