[prompt] i can't be that someone who can be like water
In some parts of the world - 'the world', as though it is the only one, as though he'd ever be able to go back, as though a more thorough exile from it is even possible - the simplest way for Martel to frighten someone would be to introduce himself. To smile a particular way; to drawl out something offensively pleasant. He had found himself a role, there, and he'd obstinately played it to the hilt until his own pride and vanity led him to his end.
How would he frighten someone? Love them sounds like a romantic notion until you consider the reality of it. Love and obsession are entirely too close together where Martel is concerned; there's something genuinely worrying about the fact he could truthfully say that he had always had his family foremost in his thoughts. Something unsettling about the quirk of his smile as he says it, whether he goes on to say he'd been trying to kill them or not.
Despite his destabilizing fear of it, nobody ever abandoned Martel. Those who left him were driven; Petrana railed at him with fearless rage until he wrapped his fingers around the hand in which she clutched a handful of his hair ripped out, displaced her ungently and half-smiled, distantly regretful and already gone. He never lay awake thinking of the stiffening of her spine or the moment in her eyes when she thought she understood and fled him, finally. In his way, in a way he'd like as not prefer not to have analysed too closely for its truth, it had been a gesture of mercy.
(He works his knuckles to the bone, drawing a home out of stone and blood and magic, and does not think about the way Candice pressed herself back against the counter behind her, or the way she looked when she found him with his mirror. He lets it roll over him when Maria laughs at him and never sees something dangerous, like a balm, like forgiveness he can't have and surely doesn't need.)
prompt: how would you go about scaring someone? [255]
word count: 344