The little beak scratching tickles--it brings a smile to your lips. A small, hesitant smile, and yet it’s a smile nonetheless, and you wish at that moment that the boy really would just leave. You’re done at the moment with interacting with strangers, and the cotton balls against your head are becoming seductive in their softness, their infectious curiosity. You wonder what will happen if you allow them in, but you do no dare give in to the impulse, because there is someone else here and they are strange and you’re not sure if you like them or not.

"I wouldn't want that anyway, little birds aren't fit for future kings. But I'm sure you two will be great together."

“Oh, thank you,” you say with a sweet, smile-less voice as you lift your head from the little beak-scratching, meeting his weird-colored eyes. The insult doesn’t escape you, and you wonder how to retaliate, if it’s even worth retaliating. He calls himself a king. He is already wrong. He does not know what you know. “I’m sure you’ll be as great of a king as your companion.” The thin air next to the boy, in front of him, surrounding him, becomes thicker as it is addressed, as though happy to be acknowledged finally.

"You could say that," they both say in unison. Your sister, and this stranger.

You’re mad, then. Livid. Furious. It comes across your eyes in a shadow, as though obscuring the dazzling, glamorous gold into something flatter and subdued. You hate what has just happened, that something could tie these two together in a way that never tied you or Sister like this. And you hate how he says—now they have even more in common, as though there were other things tying them together. You don’t like this boy. You don’t want him around anymore, you want him gone, you want him away forever. You want him killed; you wish he was dead.

You smile at him.

Sister asks about the cotton balls, and your theory is proven correct, that this was a thing that happens between bonded. “Yes, I feel it,” you say, and even though you speak with the same delicate tones as always, there is something shaded about the silks of your voice, “it’s really small.” You duck down to the chick again, for it’s beginning to wobble itself from the egg, throwing itself from the prison of it, wiggling to its feet and nibbling anything that comes close. Your nose comes close. It nibbles. “I haven’t thought of a name, though,” you confess. I didn’t expect to meet it today, of all days, at all times. Goodness, I’m –very- unprepared.


"talk talk talk"