Common

There is something calculating in the red mare's eyes that he isn't quite sure how to take. It's not lust or longing or desire. Nor is it guilt or nervousness. She doesn't look at him like a meal, but, he muses, that is the closest he'd come to naming her expression. Mostly, he is just relieved that she doesn't look at him the way Nyimara does, with lust and hate and vengeance all rolled into one messy green glare.

No, he decides, as her mouth parts and she offers her demand, Marceline looks at him like a tool. Albeit a rusty one in need of much repair, but a tool nonetheless. For what job, Rehoboam cannot imagine. But then again, it's not as if she knows him.

The dark strands of his tangled tail flick against his hocks as she lays out a careful way to lure him to Salem, as if a promise of freedom were enough to override years of carefully cultured loathing. But she doesn't know. And he doesn't have anywhere better to be. And if he's honest? He's tired.

Even if going back to Salem, to the land the silver-mane witch desired to rule with every facet of her ice-cold heart, was akin to baiting a hook and dropping it into a fishtank, it wasn't like it really mattered. Theseus was too far away and too grown to be in danger, and whatever child he had sired with Arsinoe remained as unknown to him as it was likely to be with Nyimara.

I won't tie your leash and then watch you choke on it, earns the faintest flciker of a smirk to his lips. It wasn't that Rehoboam feared that Marceline would hold him down - she struck him as the sort that had some sort of morals of her own - it was that the act of putting a leash on him at all would make him free game for someone else to grab.

And there were more than a few in the world that would delight in doing what Marceline had promised not to.

"I would say this is the Commons." He says neutrally, his gaze lifting to hers. There is a deadness in his eyes that might be easily mistaken for the sort of emotionless armor that "dark" hearted stallions tried to wear as armor, though for Reh it is hardly that. Exhaustion of both the mental and physical varieties has stolen much of his wit. Even so, he lets his short statement hang in the air between them, ripe with all the implications that came of it.

If she wanted to force him there, she could. Regardless of what his answer to her little proposal was, he had forfeited his choice the moment his pale hooves had scuffed this particular landscape. It didn't matter what bow they put on it - she seemed to have her mind made up and it was clear that no one was planning to intervene on her plans, not that he had any great desire to be entombed in the Lagoon, either.

With a soft sigh, he tipped his head, resigning himself to his fate. "So lead the way."