who has lost hope

@firecrownxd         /         remember that possession/messenger shit we talked about

“I can’t even verbalize how unfair it is that my brother gets the hot chick with the great tits and I get stuck with some kind of angry fire cow-man. You horny bastard.”

A smirk like a snarl tucked itself beneath the god-king’s lip; stern-faced and wrought of stone, but humoured in the far off way of distant gods and kings beneath it all. “You seem concerned, Ifrit. Do you think often on my biology?”

“For someone who once so boldly extolled the virtues of humankind, I find it astounding that you’ve no fondness for what is, in my opinion, their one great asset. If you took more lovers from their ranks, for instance, you might learn of their charms more intimately.”

She turned away from him, nestling further amidst the splinters of ice that formed her bedding. “And then maybe you would stop chasing things you can’t have. You might as well learn to hold snowflakes in your hands.”

“I have observed their kind for centuries,” Ifrit reminded her stonily, his ire compressed to an inured hardness. “For far longer than you have. I know their virtues. I understand them in all their bold ignominies. I don’t need to sleep with them to know that for an ontological fact.”

FIRST BANTER CALL

“You can’t bear that I loved you not,” she accused, hiding her face in the pale curve of her arm, white as moonlight on snow. “You sought to punish me for it. Deny it if you must, but I know your motives. You were hateful and cruel, and you wanted me to be pained for it. And now you’ve come to witness your handiwork. Is that it?”

“He wasn’t meant to compare to you. That was the expectation. I wanted him nothing like you. Leave me to my grief, Pyreburner. I’ll delight not in your company.” She didn’t deign to grace him with a glance. “I love the moon.”

She welcomed the sear of his mouth, like the sun, like the golden glint of hard light off a sharpened point of ice. Like a gleam made tangible.

She covered his hand with both of hers, holding it to heart like it might kindle a furnace there. (Maybe it already had.) “What gift could they earn?” she asked, although her voice had dropped to a lower note, like she were speaking sonnets and not a scoff. “I take away their crops yearly. I take their fingers and noses for their hubris against my chill. I take their heat and save it for you; or I let it dissipate to the stars. They’ve done nothing to deserve otherwise.”

Her fingers laced into his, still clutched to her chest to cage his unbearable heat there. “You could teach them proper worship,” she suggested. “Proper lovemaking. Proper devotion. They learn too little and too slow when left to their own devices. The world will end thrice over before they sort out the mysteries of an automobile.”

His fingertips traced along the cut of her collarbone, his palm laid to where her heart telegraphed its quickening pace. Eschewing the reticent hauteur of their kind, she was never more wondrous, never more wonderful. 

“I love you most then,” Ifrit whispered against her lips, kissing her with the softest catch of her gelid lip in his pointed teeth. “When you display that rare affection. When your eyes are temperate with the fullness of the generosity of your heart. When your skin is suffused with beauty that blooms of your ardor. You are an art more paradoxically beautiful than any nature of this world could compose. But you are distant, my love, and hard as hailstones. And never is your heart fully in this place. Or with me.”