You started saying shit like this, you started slipping up and saying worse. He already had. What was he thinking?
He was looking at her now, and there was a frown on her face. It was lean and pale in the dark, jaw characteristically set, stubborn and square. He lifted his brows. To what? To sympathize? To apologize? To be there at all? It’s… fine. He worked his jaw awkwardly, sucking at a tooth. She wasn’t looking at him, so he looked away again, out over the opposite railing. Out into the dark, where the leaves were just shapes edged with gold.
“Well,” he started, then trailed off when she broke off. She wasn’t wrong. He thought to offer to take that off her shoulders, but it seemed damnably insulting, and he didn’t think he could anyway.
Funny. For a year and a half, he’d barely known her name. Signing letters to Brunnhold faculty and paying fees for a stranger had seemed like a hassle; the name in ink on a letter in some adviser’s hand had left his skin crawling, and the name in Diana’s mouth worse. Now, he found himself half wanting to overbear. Like there was always a little worry gnawing at the edge of his mind, harder and harder to let go of. At first, it’d been a tie he couldn’t seem to cut; now, he felt like he was holding on, and very afraid to let go.
Her thanks was as stiff as her posture. In the corner of his eye he could see Sish eying him, craned and unabashed of her their intent to look anywhere but at each other.
Right, then, he thought. Back into the fray. Mask back on; done with all this. His head was awhirl with what he’d let slip out of his mouth.
Then – His eyes caught on a fallen gold feather as her sharp-pointed, red-embroidered toe nudged a leaf nearby it.
Because I felt drawn to it, he wanted to say, putting some aching hiraeth, lovingly-spun from nothing, into his voice. Because I felt somehow like… like it belonged to someone I used to know.
Another twitch shuddered across his face, this one irritatingly hard to ignore; he felt Anatole’s lip jump, as if without his permission. Sish’s head tilted.
Terrible and – understandable, too. The good ones, anyway. Sometimes they're just horrible, but that's not as interesting.
“It, ah – it meant something to you.” Shouldn’t have said that in the least. Being honest, honesty didn’t well become him, as he was now. Because flat-out ignoring you for two years didn’t work, and this didn’t seem more evil, at least. He swallowed. And then something happened.
My own flesh and blood, he almost said. His heart tightened. He should have been horrified at himself. As if he ever could’ve had that; not in life, and certainly not now. His own body wasn’t his flesh and blood.
…she'll live forever, but she can't love anyone without hurting them, so in the end she's always alone. And nobody ever bothers to – to try to find another way. They just decide –
Another twitch. His face itched, and he reached up and scratched it. He half-expected it to peel off underneath his fingers; it didn’t. “And to me, too,” he said. “Because I wanted to know what it meant to you. Because I wanted to know you. And because what you said about it meant something to me, when I felt – when I still feel like a –”
He stopped. He certainly hadn't meant to let that slip out.
Why’d you give it to me? he wanted to retort, like he just about had back in Bethas, but with even more force now.
“I’m allowed to care about you for your own sake, aren’t I?” His voice was a little sharper than usual, surprising him, and more than a little hoarse. “I’m afraid you’ll find I’m very stubborn on this particular point.”