[se] give and take

Melita

Eating fire is your ambition
to swallow the flame down

Gods, wouldn’t she like to chuck those rocks at his head. Or the earth. Or anything else within distance. She shifted her fingers over serrated edges and jumbled fringes, wanting them to be fangs and fire and everything cruel and hostile and feral; her lithe, slender frame threatening to unwind. “I trust Nate. Not her.” Not after becoming sick with the blight. Not after a raising of the dead. Not after so many gods damned things that had gone on – and certainly not with an impending war. The honeybee eventually felt like an inferno, and placed one of the stones back into the bag, far more carefully than intended – because then her eyes met his in a chiseled wake of gold and flame. “Why would she allow one of her strongest to not participate in a war for their survival? Why would she tuck him away, when he could be out there?” and her hand waved in various directions.

But it’s that next statement that truly set her teeth on fangs and frustration, leaning forward – an ominous vessel. “Why do you keep doing it?” All of these things, all of these schemes, all of this wheeling and dealing and forgoing all consequences until it stared him straight in the face, and blew back ten times harder. “You already had a deal. You already repaired the damage.” And then just opened up the wounds again and again and again – eventually people were going to stop bleeding for him.

to be lit up from within, vein by vein
to be the sun