katerina
My skin is crawling. The hairs on my spine stand up, one by one; it feels as though someone is running slimy, scaly fingers through the mass of my white hair, and I am cold-cold-cold, colder than I should be. The wind surely makes it worse. Or perhaps I am just weak. I watch my breath curl in the air. It coalesces, a cloud of frost.
My skin is crawling because I don’t like the way he looks at me. His eyes are cold, hard green, jewel-cut and unforgiving. They do not move from me, even as the seconds past and the air between us begins to shift. I am not afraid, at least not in the traditional sense of the word, but I am tooth-itchingly perturbed by the intensity of the way he looks at me, or more pressingly the complete lack of feeling to accompany it.
He does not care about me. He does not want me to feel better. He does not want me to recover, nor my condition to change at all.
He only wants to know—what is wrong with me, and why, and all the things I have and haven’t done to fix it. I know this kind of person. This is what happens when Oriens goes too far, when knowledge, rather than recorded, becomes worshipped like a god.
He wants to know. Not to help.
I smile. It is a cool, pleasant, placid thing that curls the corners of my lips like the ends of a red ribbon and does nothing more. Perhaps I a, not holy enough to judge him, but—
I am human enough to keep her distance.
“Thank you,” I say; the tone is sweet, and the sincerity impossible to judge. “But no. That’s alright. They are always brief.”
I blink, a dulcet slash of dark lashes. Always might be an overestimation. If they were always brief, I would not be here; if they were always brief, I might feel at least a little more in control of my life. But he does not have to know that. I will not let him know that.
All he has to know is: I can take care of my damn self.
I clear my throat. The breath scrapes a little, roughened by cold; I am flushed from the wind, but of course that is impossible to see. “Wandering,” I respond finally, and continue with an arched brow: “The way the forest looks in winter is…”
I want to say familiar, but I really have no reason to.
“…Divine. Which you seem to recognize, too.” With a little nod I gesture toward his canvas, which glitters now with still-wet paint.
He has done quite a good job so far, but I’m not in the mood to tell him so.
