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He snorts as he comes to a stop and you nearly recoil from him, heat rising in your chest in annoyance of his assumed dismissal. It is only as he looks to you, some flicker of recognition beneath the emptiness (tiredness?) written along his face, that you shove your own anger away. His is perverse in the air as it lingers, dark and poignant as it swarms within him. If it had been something you could have ignored before, it is not now, your stomach churning with the familiar desire to run despite having swallowed it moments before. Instead, your mismatched eyes flutter over the deer that pulls from you the memory of Ashamin (another ghost, another someone who had left and abandoned when things grew quiet and still, as if it were nothing) and the strange way his little creature had climbed out of a shell of all things and into the world; of Haldir and his once wolf-king. “Who is this?”
You had always been fond of the little stags, enamored with the canines and the owls, the ravens of others. It is him, the calmness on his face, that keeps you there, quelling the uncertainty that has your heart beating a little faster, your muscles tense beneath the russet of your skin, until the man speaks. Only ‘yeah?’, the coldness of his face echoing along yours as your eyes drag back to him. ‘Nothing good, I’d guess.’
“Why would you assume that?” But as soon as you ask, you know, and despite the storm raging in his heart, you laugh, as if it weren’t a serious question in the first place. For all that you don’t know about him, you assume that it would be like asking the sky why it rains, the seasons why they exist the way they do—because it just is.
“Erebos only told me that the two of you grew up together, about a girl named Aithniel and …” you pause abruptly, ears tilting backwards as you sheepishly glance away. You remember what it was to talk about her for Erebos, about the man with a gold and a white dragon who had crushed the life from their friend; remember how it made him nearly tremble with rage, how he had unraveled at the seams when he had found you in that cave, drowning in your own blood. You remember the anger, his cravings for revenge that had followed then, the chasm that it had created between the two of you just once more, and all the ways your heart still aches from it.
Finally you look back to him, a soft smile curling just the ends of your lips, trying to apologize without saying a word, afraid of pulling from him the same rage, the same hurt in case he clutches at the memory of her and all it brings as Erebos has all this time, along with the things haunting him now. You nearly mention that, too, unable to ignore the chill emanating from him, one that had not been there the only time you had met him, wanting to help, to console, to mend, but you think better of it, gathering that he would not have sought solitude if talking is how he intended to help himself. Perhaps distraction would work better for the both of you right now. “What was it like,” (before she had died and he convinced himself of a means to an end, that justice is no more than revenge) “to know him back then?”
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[P] sooner or later God will cut you down
