Common

Hey, are you alright? The words cut through the fog in his mind and he jerked away from the source of the noise as if shocked by an electric current. His default reaction was to pin his ears and take a step back, although that was due mainly to the fact that he had somehow missed the approach of the other stallion altogether until he was nearly upon him.

He could have ended you, an insidious voice whispered in his mind. Just like you ended him.

Asmodeus' hazel eyes slid shut and a shiver coursed down his spine as the memory replayed in his mind. The impact of his hooves. The dazed look. The stumbling. The bubble of blood at his mouth. The feeling of the Cove's ground beneath his hooves, the desperate flight to the ocean to avoid his mother.

That's what you wanted, the voice murmured, smoky and sickly sweet. You got your payback, just the way you wanted it.

"No," he answered, though whether he was responding to the stranger or the voice in his own fucked-up head was unclear. His throat felt raw, as though he'd somehow swallowed rocks and his gaze did not rise to the stranger's own. He smelled familiar somehow, but he was saved from his musings or an awkward explanation by the arrival of another.

Marceline.

Gods, he barely knew her, but all he wanted to do was curl into her side, bury his face against her spotted neck, and lose himself. He could pretend that all the pretty delusions he had once whispered in her ears were real while ignoring the painful reality he'd created for himself. There was no such thing as a happily ever after for a monster like himself.

"You could say that." He said, swallowing down the knives in his throat and raising his gaze to reluctantly meet her own. She doesn't know, he reminded himself. Tears gather but he blinks furiously to clear them away, unwilling to appear weak before one of the very few mares he has ever truly wanted.

"I-" his gaze cut away to the stranger in their midst and he found himself on a diverging path. It would be easy to lean on the stranger's arrival to keep the conversation light and vapid. He did not know him, and while he smelled vaguely of Atlantis (why that detail leapt out at him, he did not know) it had been years since he had spent any time at all wondering about his childhood home. But Asmodeus could not altogether deny the yearning inside of him to share what he had done, to lance the poisonous wound that had already begun to fester in his chest.

"I was just passing through on my way back to the Desert." He says after a moment, without offering much elaboration. Odds are Marceline will see through him, given that the state he currently found himself in was a far cry from the states in which he had approached her previously. "Sorry to disappoint," he offered the other stallion with a grin that was entirely forced and not the slightest bit genuine despite the poor attempt at humor. "But I'm not available. Your princess is in another castle."

It was only then that he let his gaze slide back to the relative relief (and exquisite pain that always came when looking at something he couldn't have) of Marceline's face. "In truth," he said, the lie painfully obvious even to his own ears, "I came looking to see if I could get another kiss."

Adult Stallion 16.0HClassic Champagne ChimeraSolomon x Xiomara