In so many ways, she's magnificent. There's such a straightforwardness to her level stare; her laugh; her blunt and brutal expressions- he should find them appealingly simple. He should find her so stalwart as to be dull. He should find weaving a silver net of pretty words tight around her throat and legs so easy as to be disheartening.

He should.

But instead, he finds himself yearning to throw her little puzzle pieces of himself, floating in the stream of his honey-gold words. Little rasps of his heart scraping raw the smooth lines he lays at her feet. She could kill him. He knows it. He knows it because he knows he won't stop getting near her, and he knows if she turns her teeth on him, he won't reciprocate. It's foolish; naive, except that it's not naive at all. He knows that she has the upper hand, and every singing red ribbon of her being tells him she could make good use of it.

-And yet, she doesn't. Even when he stood right at her side- his teeth all but brushing the fur of her throat- she stood unmoving as a god. Why she doesn't, he doesn't know. Perhaps, he thinks, she hasn't fallen far enough. She thinks herself at the bottom of a pit, but, as he shifts to glance at her over his shoulder, he wonders if he couldn't drag her deeper. Could he pull her down to desperation..? -And if he could, what form would her desperation take..? Sucking in a hissing breath, he finds himself burning to see it.

She claims herself far from noble, and he laughs- an abrupt, unexpected, coarse sound for his low, sweet voice. If she's ignoble, he can only imagine what she thinks of him, false and weak and nothing as he is. -If, that is, she thinks of him at all. Pausing as he rests one paw across one of the tracks she's left in the ash, he stares down at his long nails flexing slowly into the indentation of her palm.

If he dragged her down, beyond even her furthest comprehension of the blackness of the world, she would think of him, wouldn't she?

His head angles, still pointed down, to slide his gaze across the barren, dead space between them, his eyes electric as a live wire as they come to rest, unblinking, upon her cheekbone, right below the verdant, unwavering green of her own. For once, his body is utterly still, and his body language silent, his tail hanging limp and his ears trained upon her without the slightest pretense of submission. And yet, it is for the first time since meeting her that he is truly, honestly submitting- submitting to the knowledge that she is greater than he is. He blows out a long, slow breath, stirring up a whirlpool of silver smoky dust around his heels. If he could pull her into the bleakness of his own world, would she still check her temper and her teeth in his presence? Would she, then, know guilt, and regret?

So focused on this is he that he doesn't understand that she's addressed him again for a long moment, her copper voice somehow melding with the copper thrum of his heartbeat in his breast.

“And just what, or who lies within the bowels of your inner sanctum?”

He stares at her with a blank intensity for a moment, still looking through her to some version of her he wonders if he might one day see- then his dull ears prick and his too-bright eyes blink, and his frozen body begins moving again, tracking a tight circle around her fading footprints to face her fully as his gaze drops submissively once more to her mars-red paws.

"...You could find out?" He pauses, his faint voice hungering in the quiet. "...I would like it... If you found out." His eyes flick up to hers- only a moment, reading thirstily the starburst of lines in her irises, before ducking back down and away, his tail once again beginning its appeasing clockwork sway. "-But perhaps we should save that for the next time we meet?"