[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. )
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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