[AW] the changeling [fire]

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

My mother tells me, sometimes, with a certain and particular caution and tenderness, that I can be very cruel. I know that. I know that I am not tender like Ambrose, and I have never learned to be tender in all the ways that she has slowly bruised – but I am cruel chiefly in the way that the desert is cruel. (That is, impassively. Carelessly. Impersonally.) My mother tells me, with a soft strain of worry in her voice, that I can be very cruel; and I don’t ever know how to tell her that I don’t mean to, or that, to me, it never seems very cruel.

(Worst of all are the moments where I look at my mother, and I see all of the reasons why it is better to be seen as cruel than foolish, but I will not speak of those.)

I am not the only strange one here, he says, and I watch him impassively. I’m perfectly aware of all the ways that I am strange, all the ways that I am other, all the ways that I will never quite belong – so his turn of phrase rolls off my back easily, without much of a reaction at all.

“No, you aren’t,” I say, with a slight roll of my frigid blue eyes, “but your forest wants to hurt me.” The words flit off my tongue with the absolute certainty of a fact. I know that it would kill me, if it could. Oriens’ lands will never love a sun-kissed child like me; the gods barely even love their own.

His expression turns – solitary, somehow, though not in the way that sandwyrms tend to hunt alone, or in the way that my mother often looks, when I catch a glimpse of her and she doesn’t see me. (Brow-creased, tired, dark circles swelling beneath her mismatched eyes; hair half-fallen, shoulders bent. Tired. I pretend not to notice, most of the time.) He asks me why we should trust the words of mothers at all, tells me that they only leave us, that they do not care for us at all; and I wonder if he thinks that I should imagine that he came to me with care, when we know nothing of each other at all. (Any care he has, I think, must be the result of that gaping-hole want in the twin suns of his eyes, and that isn’t care at all. It is the longing for a hole to be filled.)

Oh, I can’t imagine that he isn’t speaking from personal experience, from some pitiable past that I know nothing of (and, were I older or better-built for sympathy, I might have sympathized with him in all of the ways that are appropriate) – but the notion that Mother would ever leave me is unbearable, if not unforgivable. (She is strange and sometimes-cold and strict, but I do not like the idea of anyone else insulting her.) I look at the smile on his lips, which is not a smile but more of a gnawing, angry sickle, and my eyes narrow into matching slits, a look of something like offense settling across my mismatched features.

“And what do you know of anything?” I arch my brows at him, my tone the very implication of you may be older than me, but you are still a child. He doesn’t know Mother, and, though he would beseech something of me, have me follow at his side thoughtlessly, like some foolish accompaniment, he doesn’t know me. Whatever tragedy he might have experienced, it isn’t mind to hold – we only met moments ago. My tail swipes back and forth behind me, like a feather-tailed cat, and the soft down on my wings seem to rise by fractions at my side. “Mother won’t leave me, and she does care. You don’t know either of us at all.” I raise my chin, staring up at him, my eyes still narrowed rather ferociously. “Why should I trust the words of a stranger over her?”

If there is one thing that I know already and innately – it is all the ways that the world has teeth.

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@Leonidas || being mean to leo does hurt me, ngl || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

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