new beginnings

RORY

He was suddenly self-conscious under that seafoam gaze, aware of the spindly web of scars marring his weathered face. He still sometimes woke up, sweating, in the middle of the night, his mind full of the fireball coming towards him in the starless dark. In his nightmares, he snapped out of it just before it hit him, and he wondered at the pointless mercy of it. He had already felt it once, in real life, the impact and the sizzle and the smell as the fire clawed its way through skin and nerves and ate at him. If he blinked, he could still sometimes see Esaia outlined against the fiery glow as he fell from her.

And Remi's eyes roamed them, with interest but without judgment, and Rory held still like an unsure animal, intrigued but frightened all the same. Part of him wanted to do like the bucks, flick a warning tail up and bound off majestically, but he wasn't a bloody deer.

"I could ... remove those scars entirely if you like." The breath caught in his throat, faced with such an unexpected, wild offer; Rory hadn't even considered the aesthetics of it. It just was, like so much else just was, and the offer took him by such surprise that he realized he didn't know what he wanted. It wasn't like scars were cool or anything, but part of him thought.. that he needed to keep it. A reminder of the fragility of life.

And another part thought it would be sweet to get his untarnished good looks back.

"Oh," he said, the conflict clear in his eyes and voice as his hand came up to gently touch the skin. His sense of feeling in it was all weird. "I.. appreciate the offer, I really do, but I.. I need to think about it," he finally managed, and somehow his tone conveyed that it was not a polite no, merely something that genuinely needed more thought.

Then Remi responded to Rory's casual comment of him looking better, and though his casual tone matched Rory's, the content didn't. Rory's eyebrows went up and he blinked a couple of times, keeping silent while his brain shrieked excuse me?!. Then he put his free hand back in his braid, and frowned. "You did.. what? How?" One didn't just lose their memory, and Rory definitely cared enough about Remi to want to sit him down for some tea and ask about it and.. feel inadequate. Certainly Remi had other friends who had already done that. Why on earth would he want to do the same with Rory?

"This place suits you," he responded, gently, a smile ghosting across his lips again as he looked around. He remembered the skilled hand the other had with drawing, the sketches he'd seen out by the barrier—a lifetime ago, a simpler time, more innocent. So much new and strange hadn't happened yet, aside from the influx of Outlanders. Rarely anyone aside from those from Northaven had come. Rory bit his lower lip. No darkness, he reminded himself.

He turned to Remi again and gingerly held out his Spark Bird feather. "I was wondering if you had any ideas on how to help me with this, actually," he started. The feather spat and sparked. "It has a rather annoying habit of setting anything on fire, which makes it a bit of a hazard, and I'd rather not burn my homestead down. So I thought.. well, maybe you'd have some ideas, at least?" he finished with a helpless shrug.

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.