Seraphina does not like it here.
The music is nice, and the paintings – she watches dancers perform their routines by firelight, shadows cast disjointed and fluid against the makeshift stages upon which they perform. Darkness fell hours ago; a cape of stars lines the horizon, and a full moon. The smell of alcohol and smoke is not so nice, but, then, she has never been one for revelry. (The chief revelers of Novus, however, are out of the picture, and she is not sure that she wants to know what it would be like were they in attendance. Much the same, she imagines, but stronger – and, perhaps, bloodier, for reasons that she would never quite understand, but she tells herself that doesn’t matter.) Her eyes stir from the dancers, and she turns to face the crowd. (A familiar habit. No matter where she stands, she has never been able to convince herself that she is safe. Each shadow could hide a threat, each ripple of flame an assassin’s knife – best to stay wary.) She scans unfamiliar blurs of faces and limbs and torsos and hair, and-
She freezes.
She has to be wrong, she thinks, at first, as she stares at that familiar, disappearing patchwork of orange and black and white; the gates of Denocte are closed, and he is pure Denoctian, pure Crow, and so he can’t be here. If it weren’t for a persistent specter of curiosity, she might have left well enough alone and left the passer-by to his own devices, seeing as he could not possibly be the spy that had left her Champion of Community for dead…but the specter persists, and she finds her pace quickening to follow him. She does not know what she will say, if she catches him – she doesn’t even know if there is anything that she wants to say, but some part of her is unwilling to let him, or the impression of him, slip away. Not without accountability, whispers the voice inside of her, gnashing its teeth. Not without – accountability. The words feel like disjointed fragments, because what in the hell does accountability matter in a world that doesn’t give a damn about who it hurts, but she presses forward nevertheless, a lily-scented smudge of grey weaving and twisting through the crowd like a serpent. (Some part of her is a snake, but she tries – tries – so hard to gnaw away at her fangs.) A rush of wolfish adrenaline, the leering urge of purpose prowling inside of her ribcage like a hungry wolf; she is suddenly reminded of her time as a soldier, tracking enemies led astray across the monotonous sands, waiting, waiting, waiting. Her steps are quiet, creeping, her lily-crowned skull dipped low. Ferality comes bleeding out – a ravenous, scraping anger that twists and knots like a hunger inside of her, pent-up and rotting for weeks after the Davke attack, after his attack. She feels – all carnivore. Smoke and laughter and music melt away, and she could be here or a desert hundreds of miles away. She is hunting.
She catches him; emerges from the crowd, just at his flank. “Hello, Acton,” Comes that voice, dry and frigid with cold – she wonders if he’ll remember it, even before he turns around and sees her, marble eyes ablaze with the flicker of torches. Fancy meeting you here.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
05-30-2018, 08:55 PM - This post was last modified: 05-31-2018, 10:18 AM by Seraphina
The music was fine, but his ears were closed to it; all he wanted to hear was the undulating rise and fall of the gypsy ballads that chased him into dreams every night. The paintings he barely spared a glance for, and he could hardly watch the dancers at all without feeling something cold and knife-like gut him and twist. This wasn’t the kind of pain he was accustomed to. This kind lingered. It was proving resistant to every kind of medicine he tried.
But let it not be said that Acton was the kind of man who gave up easily. Dandelion wine he’d had, and honeyed mead, and some sort of silver-veined plant a golden and antlered stranger had offered him with a knowing smile he didn’t care for at all.
Still he ached, but his edges were dulled, and the flame in him that ate and burned was a low thing now.
He drifted aimless through the cloud, less like smoke and more like a rough log on a laughing stream. There was little grace in him at the moment, just a blurred kind of interest; the world around him seemed muffled, like he was separated by a veil. In a way it was pleasant, and it should have let him forget; instead he returned again and again to the thought of Denocte, a stray dog unable to do anything but worry at his wounds.
The buckskin did not notice the shape just behind him (which did move like smoke, which might have reminded him of Raum) until it spoke with a voice that was meant to echo through a canyon like wind.
Hello, Acton.
Oh, what luck he’d had, ever since Bexley Briar caught them in that cave. Tonight he felt close to believing in curses.
First he stopped, and it was near enough a stumble that his pride would be wounded under normal circumstances. And then he turned, smoothing his expression as he did, though maybe it was dark enough so that she couldn’t discern anything, anyway. Not that she knew him well enough (knew him at all) to tell when he wasn’t himself – though when he met those bi-colored eyes he remembered again the childhood myth. This time, he was too far gone for even a flicker of unease.
“Seraphina,” he greeted, and curled his lips into the beginnings of a grin. “You look well.”
He’s drifting, stumbling; she doesn’t know if she would have caught him if he weren’t in such a state, but, as she slips closer and closer, she is met by the familiar scent of wine and…something else. She isn’t sure that it’s a pleasant sort of drifting, though – he doesn’t carry himself with the same inebriated, uninhibited joy and forgetfulness that seems to plague his fellow merrymakers. There is something to his posture that reminds her of a wounded animal, and perhaps he is wounded, but the darkness gives her little room to be certain.
Better for her, then. She still doesn’t know why she followed him, or what she intends to do with him – if anything. She doesn’t know what she wants from this.
(But she can’t let him just slip away into that blackness, stumbling and drunk on something more than wine and flowers.)
At her voice, he stumbles to an awkward halt; like this, he is almost pitiful, void of the youthful cockiness that he seemed to exude at their last encounter. He turns to look at her, features shrouded in darkness, and she can make out little more of his expression than the faint, instinctive curve of his lips. His eyes rise to meet hers. She greets them with cold anticipation, ears twitching forward expectantly to catch his words. He’s being pleasant enough – courteous, even.
He was courteous the last time they met, too. “Well enough,” She agrees, flatly, eyeing that little olive branch smile of his. She didn’t trust it back then, but it didn’t trouble her as it did now – she felt a hundred years older and a hundred years more jaded, and she hadn’t been a trusting woman to begin with. She doesn’t linger on pleasantries, or even offer any of her own, though; his entire presence is a question, and one she intends to get out of the way before she – if she - “You are far from home, Acton – I thought the Raven Gates were closed.” Not quite an inquiry, but a comment with an obviously pointed direction; why are you here? He is a Crow, after all, and the Crows are Reichenbach’s most loyal and devoted, even if they do have a reputation as troublemakers. She can’t imagine they’d directly disobey his orders, and his orders seem to have involved complete isolation…but here he is, and here she is.
(A smaller voice, at the back of her mind, wants to sink its teeth into him. Why did you do it, Acton? It bides its time, for now.)
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
With any luck he wouldn’t remember this encounter.
The problem wasn’t that he didn’t like Seraphina; the problem was he did. From everything he’d heard and seen, she was easy to admire, easier still to respect, and Acton was cognizant enough to know this wasn’t a good look on him (or anyone, for that matter).
Then again, neither was conspiring to spy on her kingdom, or very nearly murdering one of her subjects. So really, how much worse could his position be right now?
The buckskin took the thought as a comfort, and swayed a little on his feet like a limb in a breeze. At least until he asked her (well, not asking - the desert queen had perfected the statement-as-question) the inevitable.
Somehow, impossibly, it had felt like a secret so far. Hardly anyone had spared him a glance; aside from the other Denoctians, nobody seemed to know or care about the masked stallion with the glint in his eye.
“They are,” he answered, and that dark smile bloomed into a grin. There was something wrong about it, a twist at the corner of his mouth. He thought back to the trek here, days of sun and dust, how he couldn’t coax a word from Isra until they were well beyond the scarred and ruined pass. For a long moment he said no more, running his tongue across the back of his teeth and thinking of Raum and his family. He wondered how many times they’d faced the same conversations.
“I am home,” he finished at last, and laughed the harsh, black, humorless laugh of a crow. Oh, how the words hurt him, and how he welcomed that pain.
As abruptly as he’d stopped (but with a little more grace), he turned and began to walk again. He couldn’t remember, exactly, what it had been he was heading toward, but he sure as hell preferred it to standing still.
He spoke again before she could do too much with his response – namely ask him to elaborate. “You’re a long way from your desert, yourself. I take it that means you successfully put down that rebellion. I’m not surprised – I could tell you were capable.” He flicked her a look, but kept moving. The faintly sober part of him wondered if he’d slurred any of his words; he had the feeling he had, but couldn’t seem to drum up some concern.
Surely that was no way to talk a queen, but he could remember a hundred hazy nights across a scarred and beer-sticky table from Reichenbach, drinking and laughing and scheming toward dawn. Gods, how he missed those riotous, unburdened days. He was certain now he would never see them again.
This is what he had instead: weaving drunk through a crowd of strangers (in Denocte, even the crowds had felt like family), making mistakes he was sure to regret in the morning.
They are, he says, and the smile that he gives her is wrong – in the harsh shadows, its edges contort. He is quiet for what seems like far too long, before, with a laugh that is no laugh but is rather intended to fill up space, he informs her that he is home, and she is left to mull over what that means. Had he left Denocte? But Acton was a Crow, and there were none more loyal to Reichenbach than his Crows…if that was the case, it would mean that the closing of the gates had caused far deeper wounds in the Night Kingdom than she could ever have imagined. In any case, the idea that Delumine is his home strikes the silver as laughable, were she the laughing type – as it is, it strikes a familiar, pitifully disillusioned chord. She doesn’t have too much time to spend on her considerations, however; he is walking, a bit more fluidly than he did before she caught him. (He is still certainly no spy, no magician, no assassin…another drunken face to the crowd.) “No,” She decides, stepping forward to follow him, “You are no more home than I.”
He gives her no time to press him further, however, and turns her question back on her. His voice slurs and trembles, and he tosses her a look over his shoulder; ears twitched forward, she meets it, expression unreadable. “Rebellion…is that what they are calling it?” No – it was no rebellion, at least not against her. Rebellion meant overthrow, and change. Her enemies had come for neither. “No. The Davke do not desire the crown – if Avdotya wished for it, it would have been hers after Maxence’s death.” In truth, she had expected the woman to take it, and she would not have fought her for it. Now…now she knows why she did not. “No…they wanted fire and blood. They wanted revenge.” Vengeance was a pretty enough concept, until you got to know its aftermath. To her, it smells like smoke and burnt flesh; to her, it feels like the crumbled remnants of ancient murals, disfigured beyond recognition; to her, it will only ever be children with glazed eyes. “I’m sure they still do. The capitol is stable, for now…we are rebuilding. Even so, they remain, and I am not sure that there is anything we can do to be rid of them permanently.” They haunted the desert like an infestation of weeds; she would never be rid of them permanently. “And capable…hah. You know, I knew that I couldn’t trust Avdotya; they call her a viper for a reason. I just wanted to. And Raum…”
She trails off. A long, thoughtful stare, and a moment’s silence to consider her next words. “We knew that he was likely the spy, but I was…unwilling to act on suspicions alone. I hesitated - and I’m sure you know what happened as a result.” Better than she, even – she, as usual, was one step behind, left to clean up the aftermath.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Acton was surprised by how talkative, how forthcoming she was being with him – she hadn’t struck him as the type, and certainly not to him, who by all accounts should be her enemy. But he shouldn’t have been: in a way, he was a perfect confessional. He had no room to judge (nor was he the type), and he was inarguably inebriated.
You are no more home than I.
Well, there was nothing he was going to say to that; he only smiled tightly at her, close-lipped. It wasn’t until she continued that his expression faded into neutrality – but it turned curious at her talk of the attack. Acton hadn’t heard much of it, but the mention of Maxence made his heart flutter with a familiar thrill. He knew it was an awful impulse he should feel guilty for, but the buckskin couldn’t help but be a little sorry the pegasus had been eaten by the very type of beast he’d bragged of slaying. He had been an excellent foil, a terrific enemy to have.
Everything had been far less complicated, then.
But it is her talk of revenge that had him grinning, however briefly. Fire and blood – what was it she had said, so long ago? The desert breeds quick tempers.“I wouldn’t know anything about that impulse,” he said, and tipped her a wink, too drunk to think better of it.
The night was gathering around them as they continued to walk, the firelight making everyone’s features long and dramatic. Acton kept an ear keyed on her as they walked, but his gaze roved the crowd. Everything was achingly familiar but just a step wrong; he knew none of the faces, none of the laughs. He didn’t know which way the path would twist ahead.
It felt a little like being an orphan again, alone and fearful in a way he’d always hated admitting, even to himself.
So there was some measure of schadenfreude to hear her talk of her own problems. Still, her talk of putting her faith in the wrong people made his gaze narrow and his mouth twist as he thought of Denocte and the new regime. “You’re not the first to misplace your trust.”
And Raum…
Acton noticeably faltered, but smoothed his gait without a word. It was not a matter of confessing his and his friends’ sins; he would own up to those just as boldly as he would have at home. It was the reason said sins had been committed – motivations that seemed so pointless now. His loyalty was a broken compass, and the spinning was enough to make him dizzy.
He did not want to talk about Raum, or about Bexley. They were subjects too close to him to want corrupt his thought with a haze of cannabis and booze, and so he side-stepped them neatly when he answered.
“And yet here you stand, whole and still in charge.” He flashed her a grin. “I hope you realize nothing that happened was your fault. You inherited every problem that came to pass. Wheels that were already turning. But now…” the buckskin trailed off, licked his lips. When his eyes slipped to hers, they were slyly appraising, and his lips were curled.
“Now you’re free to choose what comes next for Seraphina.”
Some part of him, of course, knew that he was wrong; the black irony glinted somewhere in his flint-and-tinder gaze. But Acton had never had the sort of responsibilities she carried on her gunsmoke shoulders. His decisions had ever been his own to make, the disastrous as much as the successful (maybe more of the former, lately). He was not ruled by people or the gods – only by his own heart.
Of course, he was the one wallowing in chemicals and self-pity.
Of course, they were both unaware that the gods were soon to come.
He says nothing, while she is more than open to speak; but Seraphina is not a woman who cares much for secrets. She learned quickly – and painfully – that it was far easier to admit a mistake than let it linger, let them sink their teeth into it and tell her that she hasn’t learned. If she says it herself, it prevents anyone else from saying it for her. Seraphina is the sort of creature that grasp desperately at control whenever she feels that it is out of her hands, and, in a way, it makes her feel like she’s regained it. She doesn’t like him, she thinks, but she especially doesn’t like him so quiet; it’s abnormal and jarring, like a snowstorm on the Mors. At her words, he offers her a drunken grin and a wink that somehow set her on edge – but there’s something off about this entire conversation. “Of course you wouldn’t,” She says, still with that dry, knowing tone.
His eyes aren’t on her, but she doesn’t pay his wandering stare much mind until he speaks again. She notes the way his lips curl up at her words, the slight narrowing of his orange eyes – and she’s closer to him, now, practically at his side. Close enough to know that it was no trick of the light, at any rate. Her mind slips back to his abnormal presence, his newfound citizenship in Dawn of all places, and she prods, ever so slightly. “Have you been betrayed, Acton?” Open-ended enough to dodge, and she expects that he will. Even when he’s sober, Acton strikes her as the kind of man who can’t take things straight. Besides, he’s a spy, an assassin, a crow. She’s not sure that his drunkenness will loosen his lips a fraction, and she’s not sure that she cares about what he has to say, either.
But she’s nothing if not thorough, like a spider spinning at a web. If there’s something to be picked apart and examined, she’ll make her way to it.
She notes the way that he stumbles at the mention of Raum, then quickly corrects himself, and says nothing. His next words are startling; a strange and well-meaning vote of confidence, paired with a grin. (Not like those olive branch smiles he’d offered her at their first meeting, though. It still provokes a faint knot in her stomach.) She has a feeling that, in spite of being older than she, – though not by much - and in spite of the confidence he seems to have in his own words (that could quite easily be the result of the alcohol), he doesn’t know the weight of the matter at all. Then again, maybe he does, but the solution he offers her is all too easy – and perhaps that’s the one that he’d take. She turns her head to stare at him, those odd eyes catching like twin flames in the torchlight, and they narrow, examining him with a surgical accuracy. “Hmm. Isn’t it?” There is an edge to her voice, and she eyes him with a seriousness that, while not unusual, is somehow eerie. “Solterra is my kingdom, and it is my responsibility – any harm that comes to my nation, or my people, is my burden to bear. Fault is irrelevant.”And I haven’t suffered for it, she almost says. Not really. It was not her body buried beneath her stones, and it was not her corpse left to rot on Solterra’s streets. “Perhaps I have more influence than many voices in my nation, but my fate is more subject to it than most anyone else – and it is a fickle thing.” Calm one moment, and in a rage the next, like the sandstorms that descend upon the Mors ever so often. She hangs in the balance of her nation, and isn’t she aware of it? Her gaze tears away from him, and she looks out into the darkness of the crowd.
“It seems that people often long for power, Acton – but it comes at its loss.”
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
“No,” he answered her, bald honesty for once. “Not me, personally. But all of us, all of Denocte, not just because of that damn gate but because they made no effort to listen-” that far, that much, before he caught himself, shook his head like there was a buzz between his ears.
But it was enough, not just too much to tell her but enough to get that black roiling in his stomach again, that angry flame that ate and wanted and wanted and ate. That needed somebody to blame. And the regime he’d left was good for that, yes they were, with their knowing smiles and their we know best and their disappearing behind closed doors while Isra wept and still smelled of singed hair, of burning.
They’d almost killed her, they could have killed any of them, and hung their power like a gallows over all their heads. And they hadn’t done more than pretend to listen to their people.
It was the kind of wound that stung and stung the more you worried at it, and it was back open now.
She was close to him now, but he was hardly aware of it, except when he nearly drunken-swayed into her. He was too busy being back there, in the smoke and anger of it, all action and dread. A clamor of voices that all rose together and were silenced, dismissed.
And for what? Acton couldn’t figure it, especially not now, head muddled and dizzy with music and drink.
Luckily their walking, their conversation, was a tide and it carried him on, until he blinked to find her staring at him after his careless compliment. She was right – he didn’t know the measure of it at all, what it took to rule a land. He’d never wanted that, never sought it.
Those unmatched eyes once more unsettled him, and he stopped. A cool breeze tugged at his dark hair and her bright, and pressed against his cheek like a kiss. Her words were serious (were they ever not serious? She is his opposite in more ways than one) and he listened to them with due gravity, but he could not help matching them up against what he’d seen from his own king.
“You’re right,” he said, and meant it, the same kind of open, almost angry honesty it had been before. He felt, drunk and otherwise off-kilter as he was, that he could fall into those eyes that met his own, and that if he did they would burn him alive. “You’re right,” he repeated with the listing firmness of the fairly drunk, “and that’s what makes you better than the rest of us, Seraphina.” Acton did not say it with any kind of crooked sarcasm or eye-rolling judgment. He said it and thought of his own regime, who he could not picture standing here and saying fault is irrelevant.
It was a relief when she turned away, and he could feel his body loosen when the weight of her gaze moved off of him. Suddenly the night had sound and color again, and all at once Acton felt terribly tired. Bone-weary.
At her last words he twisted an ear, dropped his chin another fraction. Before he answered her he started moving again, back to his aimless walking, tugged on by the pull of the crowd.
“I thank the gods I’ve never wanted it, then,” he said darkly, and did not laugh.
For a moment, something dark and snarling rears its head. There’s something venomously honest in his tone, a fury that is somehow more correct than anything else in this conversation and somehow even more confusing, because Acton is a Crow, and there are none who are more loyal to the Night Kingdom’s Sovereign than his crows. The gates. A silenced people. Dragonfire. For a moment, the world around them seems to burn; she swears she can feel the heat licking at her heels. “And that’s why you left Denocte?” There’s a note of something like incredulity in her tone. His home, his people – all left behind. Seraphina’s unwavering devotion to Solterra is practically hardwired into her, and she can’t quite comprehend leaving one’s nation behind, no matter how monstrous. (And the razing of the valley is a miniscule horror, compared to the terrors of Zolin.) But, she supposes, that’s irrelevant – of course that’s why he left Denocte. In her mind’s eye, she sees Isorath and his dragon, perched on the ramparts; she remembers the uncertain, if not outright fearful, stares of her citizens. In her mind’s eye, she sees Reichenbach in the one time she had ever met him, an easy smile and a string of coins that caught in the sunlight; he had been strange, the kind of person that she could never quite wrap her mind around. In her mind’s eye, she sees the Stormsinger, her silhouette illuminated by a flash of lightning; her cheek burns.
She can’t possibly fathom their motivations, but the anger that their decisions have caused has been palpable. In spite of it all, she thinks that she feels something like disappointment towards those that have run from the Night Kingdom. (Of course, in the time of Zolin, she couldn’t have fled - there was no escape for girls like her.) Where was all of their devotion to the kingdom that they called their home now? No decision of the rulers could make it cease to be what it was.
It makes it a bit easier to interpret his next words, however, and his next confusing – and even more confusingly genuine - compliment. His mind isn’t on her. It’s away in some distant, dark place, smelling of jasmine and woodsmoke and accompanied by the sound of clicking coins. “No. Better… better means a choice. I don’t choose.” The truth of the matter is that, were she anyone else, she didn’t know what she’d do or think in the place of the Night Court’s Regime – if she could feel in the same way that they did, if she hadn’t been beaten into subjugation, if she had ever been allowed anything more than self-sacrifice in the name of her people, then she may well have been selfish or volatile or defensive. There was nothing morally upright about making a decision that had been her only choice.
When he speaks again, his tone is strangely dark, but not in the way that she expects – not a crow’s darkness, or the volatile, burning darkness that almost sent Bexley Briar to her doom. She doesn’t know what it is, only that it is pitiful in the strangest and most uncomfortable way. She’s quiet for a moment, letting the sound of the crowd fill the slowly-growing space in-between them. “…What do you want, Acton?” As she watches him weave through the crowd, a wandering wisp of orange flame amidst a rolling, tumultuous sea of bodies, she thinks that the truth of the matter is that she doesn’t think he’ll have an answer – or, more accurately, not an honest one.
He’s as lost, and he's drunk, and he's impossibly far he is from the free bird she met once in a desert at a time that feels so very long ago.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
“Yes.” The word was bitten off, hard as scorched and dried earth, daring her to question him further.
What Acton knew was that loyalty was a two-way street, and his love for Reichenbach did not matter a whit if his king’s love had shifted to something else (something smirking, with scales of ivory and gold, and eyes that glinted like a snakes’). For years the Crows had laughed at their leader’s wayward heart, but none of them were laughing anymore. Reichenbach had been a home for all of them, bastards and orphans and misguided children, and he had made a home out of the Night Court.
And then in the space of a handful of decisions, he had let that home become a cage.
Acton remembered what it was like, to live in a cage. To be punished for doing the only things he knew how to do. He remembered what it was to be taken advantage of, to be manipulated, to be promised his freedom someday. Soon, soon, if only he listened and did what he was told.
He had tried to obey, and it had changed nothing, and so freed himself the only way he could.
It had been harder the second time, but he’d done it all the same, and he’d rather drink himself to death than allow himself a second to regret it. Besides, if it was only him he might yet have stayed – but there was Raum, and Sabine and Rhoswen, and Isra and her endless fear. The stakes had been too high.
And anyway, Acton would never have been able to keep his mouth shut. The thought twisted his lips into a brief, incongruous smile. “I suppose I could have stayed and been eaten by that oversized lizard. Would have solved problems for a few people.”
What would he have done, had Seraphina voiced her disappointment then? Laughed, maybe, at how wildly different they were – a point her next comment only drove in deeper. He felt something like the same disappointment, the same lack of understanding.
“There is always a choice.” To run, to fight, to say fuck-all to the gods and burn the current way of things to the ground. Of this he was certain. She could have done any number of things, just as the Night Court regime could have, and he shook his head at her almost dismissively, like a wave of his hand. “Not making it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
Her next question followed him like a ghost, and when the words finally caught him he paused like a boat at the end of its tether. Acton barely took the time to consider it, just shrugged a burnished shoulder before replying.
“I want what everyone does. I want the people I care about with me, and the freedom to do what I want.” Of course there was more to it than that, but he was too hazy-drunk for details, and anyway that was the bulk of it. The buckskin had never cared much for power or prestige; he wanted to have fun, wanted to be good at what he did, wanted the brotherhood of his little rag-tag family.
But his family was fractured, he was purposeless, he was miserable. He felt his lip curl in something that was between a sneer and a snarl, and forced it away with a swallow.
“And I want another drink. So unless you’re planning on buying me one…” He threw her a last burning glance, wondering at the way her skin seemed to drift and shift like smoke under the moonlight. If he was looking for something in her gaze, he did not find it. “Have a lovely night, Seraphina.” When he turned away from her, he could still feel the weight of her gaze settled like an spear-point between his shoulder blades, and he did not care for it one bit.
With the right mixture of liquor and luck, maybe he could forget this conversation had happened at all.
@Seraphina bit of a bleh post from me, sorry. this has been a great thread!
