Perhaps I should be afraid of her. Perhaps I should feel the unfamiliar tingle of fear in the back of my neck, taste uncertainty and nervousness in my throat and yet, why should I? She is small, a scrawny thing, and she had only been able to trick Solaris, no other. I was not like him, not so blinded by...honor and truth...there was little good within me for her to steal and manipulate. Perhaps I am callous, then, when she lashes forward like a snake, my body not flinching but my mouth parting only briefly to release a single syllable of a laugh-that-would-have-been. It seems she is not fighting me. She's fighting something else. Who?

I allow her those moments of...strangeness, oddity. I wait as patiently as one can wait, my eyes seldom leaving the dark pits of her companion. Roamin. The name is not Solaris. The name causes an ear to flicker, an eye to twitch and then, my gaze shifts instantly to hers. My lip twitches and I hold back the slightest hint of a grin. Solaris not dead. Gone but not dead. Whoever this Roamin is...she can keep him. But Solaris? I can still take him back. "Bring him back?" I ask flatly. "Everyone dies?" I snort. "Only because somebody kills them."

She is even stranger now, more a devil and a witch than before. She rambles and splutters, hissing words out like venom. I cannot help but recoil at her, afraid of some infection and yet, I cannot help but lean in all the same, knowing well she is the key to Solaris one way or another. She can bring him back and she can hurt him too. She was right, after all: he had left us. He had left me. How despicable to think I have more in common with her than he at such a point.

"You will stay here," I repeat her words with narrowed eyes and taut lips, "and you will bring him back. He will come. He left me for you...and you for nothing." I will take everything of his, I think, and he will have to come back to take it all back. I will take her, his future, his past, whatever I can take. He had promised me. I had waited. And now, when I needed him, he was nowhere to be found. "Go to his den. Bury it. He will have no home to return to but...us." The word us sits awkwardly in my mouth and yet, I cannot let my guard down. She is a snake but snakes can be charmed with great effort.