There are a thousands pieces of her that have almost forgotten they have existed at all. A bit of her heart blooms and flutters in her chest, soft as the butterfly wings of a young girl's heart when she looks at a boy with skin smooth and sleek as a leopard. There is a tremble in her wings, a bit of submission in the way they flicker and fold like stars into the atmosphere of her blushing glow. And each of their parts lament as they fall to the sea-bottom of her violence, hunger, and wrath.
Amaunet does not feel them as they go, not when he smiles with young and feral sort of grace. All her butterflies turn to wasps in spring (driven on by instinct and little else). She counts his teeth like scars.
One. Two. Three. Until the smile fades into words.
And it takes her a moment to gather up the wasps in her belly and the numbers falling through her thoughts like arrows, and spears, and suns caught in the moon-dark. And it takes her another second to mold his words into weapons caught tightly between her teeth when he swings them. “I've always watched you fight.” His weapons seem almost dull now-- dew dusted petals beneath the humming wasps. She misses the teeth, the tips of them, the why her blood is bellowing for the imagined sting of them.
Her blood is roaring when she bares her throat to the dark snarl of his smile. The pulse throbs there, in the shadow between her glow and his darkness (like two universes colliding in the vastness of space). Amaunet does not pause to wonder which gravitational pull will swallow them whole when she snaps her wings open into the silence like a solar flare. “If we had fought I would have laid my teeth against your throat. And I would not have relented until you begged mercy like a prayer to your god.” Above his teeth she smiles, and her laugh is more purr than amusement (more lust and promise than blood).
When she steps closer it's another crack in the silence existing only here in this the tight, weighted blackness between them. It's another challenge, another solar-flare and comet crash. It's another begging bit of poetry for all the things that their violence will not let their lips and hearts taste. It's another weapon held viciously between her aching teeth.
She does not pull the hollow of her throat away from his lips. “Would you like to know what power feels like? Or would you rather know what it tastes like?”
And even as she challenges him-- she prays.
@August
