A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
Somehow, in talking to her, Abel had forgotten his thirst.
It returns now, sandpaper raw within the column of his throat, a tightness along his jaw. Yet he finds, as they track toward the city with the sun on their backs, that there is a piece of him that would rather stay in the dry wilds with this girl than go to the bright heart of Solterra and drink. Abel knows what else waits there.
He makes no connection between Raum’s burning-blue eyes and Sabine’s of clear winter blue. How could he? It is unlikely, it smacks too much of fate. If he guessed, then he must also know that something terrible will follow, resulting in another bar across his shoulders, another weight to bear in silence.
It is as if she reads his mind, reaches careful fingers into his thoughts, when she speaks again. Of course he should know better; he looks like the kind of boy who is not okay. His ribs are the slats of an old barrel, his throat is an hourglass with the sand running through, his eyes are the kind that watch from wet shadows and pass no judgement at all. Nothing in Solterra is okay right now, except perhaps the vultures. They will always survive.
I am a vulture, too, he reminds himself. This is how he knows he will be fine, even as everything crumbles away. He is weak but he is not fragile. The difference is important.
She is affecting him already, because he stops, turning back toward her, and the way his eyes search hers makes it seem like the question was his, and the concern too.
Abel ponders the question, turning it over carefully, like something small and sharp or like a stone that might be anything, if you broke it open. “I don’t know what it would look like,” he says at last, “to be okay.” He doesn’t want her pity, isn’t looking for it, wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had it (use it - of course - make it a tool, or a weapon). He says it matter-of-factly, and wonders when he was last okay. What a luxury, those simple syllables become; what a life he imagines for himself. Okay must mean his parents, alive. Food in his belly and a roof over his head and knowing that although there were monsters, and darkness, and dread, they were on the other side of the door.
“Are you?” he asks, because it seems polite, because her asking has made him feel like a boy again, with someone to worry for him. “Sabine?” He adds her name before he can help it, and at once his dark gaze darts away, guilt and something else mingling in him. It feels dangerous to say her name, to call those bright blue eyes onto himself. Already he wants to say it again.
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