caine
—« without guilt »
C
aine has always wondered what it feels like to cry.Does it feel like relief? Like metaphorical weight off a metaphorical chest?
(Anguish plus pain with an aftertaste of fury. When he had been very, very young, and as empty inside as a bell, Agenor had filled him up with equations. Happiness and anticipation equals optimism. Repeat after me. Anger and helplessness equals despair. Look at your book, you are not looking. Pain and joy equals—
"Love."
"Good. But you must be faster.")
Or is it a bucket of water tossed over a field of dancing flames? Like putting something out. Like putting something dangerous, out.
He looks at Warset, his thoughts bottled up and tangled, and wonders which one she'd choose.
“I do not know how to think of darkness that way. Darkness has only ever been a thing to shine against as we twisted lines of pale light through it to form the constellations between us.”
Everything she says sounds like music. Like reeds blowing in the wind, or of sparrows bursting into flight, or of rain softening into mist. There is something melancholic and echoic about it, something not-quite-mortal, that Caine wants to grasp gently by the wings and admire, and it would not struggle, and he would bring it softly up to the window and look at how the sunlight gilded it.
And then he would let it go, because he only took when he was told to, and he had never been taught how to be selfish.
“When you put it that way,” he says, his lips tugging up in a half-formed smile, “I feel a little jealous.” He pauses, his teeth biting down on his tongue, as he struggles to convey how exactly he is jealous.
How does he tell her he has only ever been the dark?
How does he tell her that his shadows were so cold when he was already frigid to the touch, like a corpse; that every time they left him they took so much of his heat that he was afraid, irrationally afraid, that he would never gain any of it back?
He doesn't say anything. Instead, he slumps forwards and buries his head against her neck, the wine making everything heavy, his skin so cold against hers he thinks (too late) that it must be fairly unpleasant. “It must have been warm, as a star,” Caine whispers, his breath hot, his voice muffled.
“Mortals are foolish things,” she says, suddenly, and his mouth quirks. How like a star she sounds, then; how glad he is that he is holding her now, that she is warm, that she is there, so he knows she has not left when he had been hesitating. “We are, aren't we.” His mask digs into his cheek. He wants to tear it off. “Troublesome and foolish.”
When she speaks again he lifts his head, his hair catching on the edge of his mask and hers, and considers the weight of her question. His cloak still floats obedient as a hound besides her; it had not budged, when he had. But now there is something cutting to her voice—no longer reeds, or sparrows, or rain, but glass.
Is that what it felt like to cry? Did it cut, like broken glass?
“I wouldn't know,” he begins slowly. “I have never cried.” Caine doesn't mean for it to sound like a confession; yet around her, everything always ended up being one. “But... I assume it does. Some mortal children, when they hurt themselves, cry and cry until their mothers come over and press their lips to their wounds. They don't do anything else, but the child—they stop crying.”
Mortals are foolish things. “The wound stops hurting. Strange, is it not? Yet I think this—” he nudges the cloak, the velvet like water beneath his nose, “—is supposed to feel like that. Things do not feel any less. But we like to believe that they do.”
We. Because even if she wasn't before, Warset was a mortal now.
And, foolish as he has always thought them, foolish as they so often are, Caine has never wanted to be anything else.
When he offers her the cloak again, he doesn't hesitate. It presses against her eyes and he says to her, very softly: “I will call them for you. The shadows. If you'd like me to.”
@Warset
