Meadow

She shifted as his eyes on fell on her, the facets of her jewel eyes glittering through the slithering dark of her mane- he couldn’t place the expression on her face, but there was an expectation to it. He didn’t know what question she was asking with that look, but as she casually slid a little closer to fall fully under the protection of his tree, he answered it by drifting nearer to her space, shoulder first to be polite, mouth- and teeth- pointed away.

“The first time it happened, it did,” she murmured, considering the rest of her reply carefully, and he looked away to give her some small privacy as she assembled it. Mad..? Was he angry about it? ‘Not angry enough.’ Not enough to make a difference. Even rage would be preferable to this sense of loss and helplessness. Betrayal, the knife still deep in his back, because pulling it out would leave the wound gushing, and he wasn’t sure with what. Even remembering that dark face staring at him, so familiar and yet so alien and frigid- something he’d never seen before wearing the flesh of someone he’d known dearly- left him with a visceral sense of fear rather than hate. Could he even hate the thing? -His gilded friend was talking again, and he tore himself back to her with a cowardly sense of relief.

“-I have a bad habit of picking fights with trees and rocks when reality stops making sense,” she joked, the velvet black of her mouth quirking at him slyly. He choked back a weak laugh, his brow crinkling, torn between pity and envy. “Do you win many of those?” tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop it, soft with humour but just a little too earnest in the asking, and he swiftly looked away, shuttering his gaze under his bright lashes in a vain attempt to be less transparent.

“Want to trade trauma?”

Light. Casual. Almost joking- maybe hoping to be easily brushed off as such, but as he glanced back down at her, the tropical glisten in her shaded eyes had the intensity of a storm gathering. He hesitated, peering under the glossy dark shapes of her lashes, trying to focus on the textures and colours and structures of her face rather than face her careful scrutiny in earnest. He tried on a smile, and he could feel it was clumsy; defensive.

“Trauma..? I’m not sure I…” The word had a heaviness in his mouth and mind that he didn’t like. A permanence. He swallowed it off his tongue quickly and managed a smile this time that looked a little better, crinkling his eyes with a caring pity. “…That isn’t what I’d call it. It’s just- disappointment, maybe.” At his brother. At himself?

“As you said, I- thought I knew someone.” He knew he’d known him. No one better. “But something- changed. I don’t know what. One day they just weren’t…” His stare drifted to her feet, gleaming ivory like treasures in the grass, but he didn’t see them. “One day they were something else,” he finished at last, carefully neutral. He shifted his legs, easing the sudden tension out of them, and arched his dark brows as he fixed his smiling gaze back on her mercurial face, friendly and gentle.

“Underwhelming, I know,” he chuckled, tilting his pale head invitingly down to her, “but if it was worth the trade..?”