You are the night-time fear
Ah, it is a new tree. His lips stay curled in their smile, a silent, single laugh puffing out his chest, and he lets her have the victory. He does not need to counter every word. He does not need to outwit her. She is difficult to read, feral and deranged in some way, but she does not belittle him for his response: he chooses to think of it as approval, acceptance. Slowly, they become an island in the sea.He knows he might be setting himself up for a fall, but he does it anyway: her strange and harsh almost-laugh binds him, lets him mellow, relax—
"Bites," he confirms, watching her creep forward, wondering who she is, how she died, what she is doing here. What she wants, what she dreams of, why she still (like him) run about in the clothes she died (unlike him) in. They're stiff with salt, white rims licking along the hard creases, her tangled mess of a hair done up with seaweed while his is done with grief.
He thinks he knows how she died.
He thinks he knows why they avoid them: her movement is a menace, and he gives off the air of one you disturb at your own peril.
His head tilts as she advances, and his gaze snaps to the other—fingers rustle young boughs, which bob and giggle. Aamu's eyebrows rise. A giggling tree? Surely an artefact of the Old Gods, and he doesn't know how he feels about this (largely because he doesn't remember enough—)
She looks back at him, and he wonders if she feels cheated of that first touch, of the discovery. Slowly he moves forward, wishing there is some way he could give it to her. "Maybe it only bites Ascended," he muses as response. Abomination is much too harsh a word; he has spent so much time fighting that very notion that he cannot find it in himself to put that label on another, even a tree.
But he doesn't tell her this, only reaches out with a pale and slender hand to touch chipped, worn nails to the merry, dancing boughs.
You are the morning when it's clear
AAMU
