august
—« “Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!" »
I
n what already feels like a past life, August dealt in secrets. Never his own - anything he shared in the confines of bedroom walls was usually a lie, or innocuous enough not to matter - but the things he learned, all the fantasies and jealousies and fears, taught him long ago that you could never really know somebody without knowing what lay a couple layers beneath. For instance, he knows exactly the things that made him the way he is, and all the fateful turning places, the fulcrum points of his life. He wonders, for the first time, what those moments might have been for the Regent.
“A change of a couple things,” he says, wryly. “It took me a while to figure out just who I am these days.” He glances at her from below his silver lashes, considering. It seems to him that being in Delumine, a festival among strangers, felt like a safe place to share things he otherwise might not. It was a little like the island, in that, but more of a dream than a nightmare. “You met me at kind of a low point.”
He doesn’t elaborate, not yet, since he still isn’t sure Morrighan actually cares. None of their previous interactions have left him with the impression that she does.
It’s easier, anyway, to shift his attention back to the girl. Curiosity is always more fun a feeling than the scathing self-reflection he’s been practicing the last few seasons. August’s expression softens when Morrighan says she doesn’t know the real world yet. As an orphan raised in a rag-tag family of orphans, he knew exactly what she meant. “Well. I hope it takes her longer to meet it than it did me.” The palomino shifts, shaking himself from the more melancholy mood, and gives the Regent a smile tinged with mischief. “Where’s dad?”
