[CLOSED] Isley & Priscilla
Who: swordofthenorth and yetsleeping
When: Sunday, September 4th, Morning
Where: Isley’s home, East Anatole
Format: Paragraph
What: It’s an emergency! With paint...?
Warnings: A colorful mess is bound to ensue. I'd drop a Pocahontas "Colors of the Wind" pun here but I'm sure someone would smack me for it.
( . . . to paint away the warmth with winter. )
When: Sunday, September 4th, Morning
Where: Isley’s home, East Anatole
Format: Paragraph
What: It’s an emergency! With paint...?
Warnings: A colorful mess is bound to ensue. I'd drop a Pocahontas "Colors of the Wind" pun here but I'm sure someone would smack me for it.
( . . . to paint away the warmth with winter. )
“Change is constant; the cycle of life revolves around that truth just as all things do. Why, even in death there is change.” It was in Anatole that he had first spoken those words to her. Since then, Isley had spoken them many times over. Was it was because he believed he was speaking truth, or because he was trying to convince himself? He had never bothered to find out the answer to that question.
His gaze drifted back to his paints. Idly he dipped the tip of his brush into them, and then swept them over the surface of the wall. Snowy hills rose upward, shadowy valleys between them like pathways the sun could not reach. He chose grey and brown for stumps and tree trunks; white, cream, and black for birch. Barren branches like skeletal hands clawed upward, green pine needles and brown, whole beds of them, led aimless trails into a growing and dense forest.
The smile was fading again, replaced by something cold like the snow and lonely-like the loneliness she spoke of, but did she realize that he felt it, too? Even with her by his side, and even with Raki and Rigaldo, his was a plateau that was isolated.
He painted that, too. Into the side of a rising cliff, the peak of which the sun cast in blinding lights, glaring off icy caps, beautiful to look at, and yet so far out of reach, so dangerous to hold onto.
“I’m not certain I want to know,” he answered finally.
He had his suspicions. He was not fool enough to believe that Priscilla had ever seen in their trio the family that he had, that she had felt the same comfort by it that he did. Her head was always somewhere else, over the hills and far away. “You told me that you liked the way he smelled.”
That, evidently, had not been referring to his insides, because Raki had never found himself gutted by her butcher’s fingers.
A glance to her side showed Isley just how occupied her world truly was, just as she described it. Footprints, lights...and his held none of those things, even in the daylight when life stirred the most. She felt so much more than him, and so much less at the same time.
“All that mattered to me was that you did, and that was enough for me.” He said this staring at her. After a moment of pause, he took a step nearer.
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There was a more difficult subject. Complicated layers of intertwining thoughts - the reason she had been drawn to him initially, and the reason she had followed him. It wasn't affection that made her stay with him, though to say she lacked fondness for him entirely would be a little too extreme. But she remembered her heart then, which was colder then and felt very little even when it felt at all. It was not a heart that would lead her away from Isley, away from the South that was her home, and toward the rocky western lands.
It was not a heart that would often lead her anywhere at all, really.
...perhaps that was why he didn't want to know.
Priscilla looked down, briefly. Her she tightened her fingers around her brush for a moment, pondering how much to say... and then he stepped near, and saved her from the decision.
She smiled up at him - a soft smile, welcoming and warm. "I did." She nods once, a tiny gesture. "He smelled like..." old blood and unfulfilled vengeance. "...familiar things. It drew me in."
Not quite a fiction. But perhaps more comforting than the truth.
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Isley pondered for a brief moment what might have been familiar to Priscilla at that time; the south was one possibility of many.
"It drew you in," he repeated with a nod. Like a moth to the flame, or maybe more like a spider to a fly. No, not that, either. Raki was greater than a mere fly. Even if they had first met him when he had been small and seemingly insignificant, the boy had incontestable passion and potential. Isley had taken to him for those reasons, and because...something in Raki reminded Isley of himself.
"Well, I suppose he drew me in as well. I also saw...familiar things in him."
And he had wanted to shape those things, to make sure that not one went to waste. He helped Raki hone his skills, strengthen his mind and his body. Before long, he wasn't just a simple human in their midst. Raki had become, at least in Isley's mind, family. Or as much of one as he could ever hope to have.
"I'm happy that he drew you in, whatever the reasons." For all the weakness it instilled in him, Isley had never been happier. Strange how that was possible. "Do you ever miss him?"
Smiling, he brushed the colored bristles of his paintbrush over Priscilla's nose. The motion left a gray-blue smear in its wake across her pale skin.
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It was probably not terribly mysterious. Reminisces, looking back to the time they had spent together with that boy. For Isley, the memory would be molding, it would be family. It would be watching Raki grow and become all the warrior he could be without becoming a hybrid, too. Human, but nearly as strong as a low-ranked soldier. And as skilled as a top-ranked one. That, she knew, was Isley's doing - his mark on Raki's life.
His gift, too. Hadn't he done the same for her? She came to him as a novice and left as... well, true, she can't equal Teresa in skill, but the gap is much smaller, these days, than it had been.
Raki was no different, really. Like her, he had come to Isley in need of his knowledge, his experience. And like her, he'd been changed by it. For the better, she hoped. Now she hoped. Once, at home, it hadn't mattered so much.
...why hadn't she told Isley then, what Raki was to her? Had she even known? And what sort of creature follows a boy for seven years, lets him lead her back to herself... and then leaves him to die in a ruined town?
Priscilla stares down at her arm - the one she gave him, long ago. And she opens her mouth to answer, though she's not entirely clear on what the answer is - she had cared less for him when she knew him than she does in retrospect. A shift in nature can be so powerful. And yet--
--yet, there was paint on her nose.
Priscilla blinked once. Twice. And then she raised her fingers to the tip of her nose, all cool and apparently greyish blue... or so said the color that came away onto her fingertips.
"Maybe," she said, and reached up to swipe white-blue over his chin.
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