to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
She’s a small sun, hidden away beneath the canopy, and he wonders if all the creatures of the island find her strange and unknowable. Like she’s the magic, savage thing, and not them. Though this then makes him wonder if all the horses are viewed as invaders, and may yet be treated as such - gods know they’re ill-prepared for an organized attack, so far from shore, thrown together in a foreign land.
Best not to think about it. If this was Tempus’ doing, and He wanted them dead, then there wasn’t much use in worrying.
August observes the moment when his tattoo clicks in her mind, and though he smiles - a Cheshire kind of smile - neither of them say anything. When their eyes meet again he arches a brow, curls his smile into a little grin at what she says. As she looks past him (at what? his imagination conjures a thousand things, perching behind him in the undergrowth, but her expression suggests nothing dire) his lambent gaze touches once more along her, as though her body is a map that might tell him where she’s been. He thinks, unbidden, of Anghavni informing him of Raum’s upcoming visit to the Scarab. What might Bexley Briar do, if she knew?
“You have lovely shoulders,” he says, airily. “Like the first dunes of the Mors.” Golden and smooth-sloping, perfectly unmarked. He might have reached out to touch one, a new dare, if she hadn’t chosen that moment to meet his gaze again, and when she leans back he echoes the movement. August barely bats an eye at the giving of her name (and the compliment after), but he admires her for not pretending.
At her question his gaze strays away, touching light and swift as a dragonfly over all the oddities around them. If you didn’t focus on a singular part, nothing seemed terribly out of order. It wasn’t until you started paying attention that things got…unusual. “What, stay home and miss all this?” There’s a hint of wryness, in his tone, but August means it true enough; there has always been a part of him begging for adventure, and a part that reminds himself that the Scarab is enough of one. Every day a new problem to solve, a dozen situations like the heads of a hydra that need stamped out, another net to cast and line to test. Enough to keep him occupied, enough to keep him happy - but he still can’t drown it, the boy inside him who wants the open ocean, who wants a sword fight, who wants mysteries met with steel and wits.
But these things he keeps shut away, where they can’t betray him.
It’s a different kind of honesty he opts for, when he turns back to her and rolls a shoulder in a shrug. “When the eruption began, I thought it might be it - the end. Might as well go to meet it.” Better to go out and meet your death than have it set on you on the road; better to make an adventure of it than cower and wait and always wonder what was happening just over the crease of the horizon.
Had he (does he) really believed that this island was an extinction? Standing here with her, it seems laughable. But August does not laugh, only regards her, and feels the heat roll between them like trapped sunlight, like a tremor under the sea. “Your turn.”
@Bexley | <3
