well any man with a microphone
can tell you what he loves the most
can tell you what he loves the most
It’s not until the stranger - kidnappee? - speaks that August realizes his mistake. That the pegasus is no boy, as he’d seemed at first, but a man his own age. This makes him feel slightly less irritated by Manon (at least she wasn’t stealing children) but leaves him just as confused. Was this one of the Red Rose’s games? Gods knew she didn’t view romance they way normal horses did, though none of them at the Scarab could be accused of that.
At any rate, if this was some sort of seduction, the poor fellow didn’t seem to be in on it. His panicked expression is genuine (August has seen enough to know) and his own mouth furrows at the corners like a ditch being dug as the gray speaks. There was no question of Manon’s work - but what could she have wanted?
“Hmmm,” he says, unwilling to give anything away - not that the stranger seems dangerous, but he might have information that is. If possible, August would like to release him back into the streets of Denocte without him being any the wiser of where he’d been. “A misunderstanding is right,” he adds, pitching his voice into something more soothing, something suggesting this could all be worked out amicably. Which, he is sure, it would be - as soon as he found Manon. The woman possessed a rare gift for making herself scarce.
His thoughts stopped idling when the pegasus’ gaze caught his, the terror there pinning him to the present. Oh, and now his own heartbeat bounds forward in sympathetic response, a traitor to his memory; the expression the youth wears is one he knows, one he’s worn too. “No, no,” he assures him, struck by the dread ice of that look, but before he can say anything else the door swings again and Aghavni is at his side. To her look he only shrugs, raises his brows in a way that says you know as much as me.
The palomino steps back, then, glad to give his companion a go at the mystery, gladder yet to give his heart a chance to resume its normal pace. For an instant there, in some weird contagion, he had been back in that barred wagon in the desert, the sun baking him in tiger-stripes, his captors outside and looking in. It is not a place he likes to revisit.
It’s to settle himself as much as the stranger that he snatches a crescent of custard from the plate, half in show - no poison here! - and half because they look incredible. “That boy is outdoing himself,” he says, offhand, but when his gaze lifts to the unicorn’s again it conveys a host of questions. In two quick bites the treat is gone - enough time for the woman he serves to name their location. Honesty it is, then - at least for now.
“Yes, and we generally give our guests a much warmer welcome.” For the moment he holds in his long-suffering sigh; there would be time for that later, as he an Aghavni discussed what to do about their resident Rose, who seemed to be growing wilder by the week. “I’m August, and this is my associate, Aghavni.” He almost winces at that word, associate, which does not at all encompass what they are (what are they? a hundred things, whatever they need to be for each other). Instead he smiles, like a man who holds all the answers, and every one is it’s going to be okay. “What’s your name, and where, ah, should you be? I’m sure your friends must be worried for you.” And here, another glance at the unicorn, one that wonders just how much of a mess Manon has made for them.
@Erd @Aghavni
