((OOC: God. I never saw that Kitty had replied to this topic. I'm so, so, so sorry guys.....you'll probably not want to go on with this thread anymore, but I owe it a post. Sorry again!))
The moisture was gathering at the corner of her eyelids, the noon sunshine seeping through the dusty windowpanes refracting off the transparent sheen. The blue of her eyes was brighter for it, bright, carpeted with a layer of salty liquid that refused to coalesce into drops; as stubborn as their owner, clinging and clinging and downright refusing to fall.
And in that crystalline water, Reid saw himself. A small, black image mirrored in her pupils. It was like staring through a looking glass.
If I could give you one gift under the sun......I would give you the gift to see.....to see yourself as others see you....so that you may know-
Know that to see yourself was to see others. That the same hate, the same derision, the same dark-tinted spectacles with which you saw the world, was a two-way looking glass. That others saw you through the same barrier, and judged you through the same, and no better.
It was one thing.to be uncaring. To truly give nothing about the opinions of the world. It was something else entirely to see past the mind of the girl standing two feet away, hoarsely screaming at him, a mind so like to his own- and find himself......demonised.
It was no great chore to understand what she was implying. What she thought he had done. Had done in spite of knowing better than anyone else in the world, being acquainted with the pain of losing a.........It wasn’t just lack of expectations. It was.....what she thought.......what she saw in him.......it went past bastardliness. What she saw in him, expected of him, it was......
Inhuman cruelty. A voice in his mind spoke, quietly. Inhuman.
Glass and stone, the thought fleeted across Reid’s mind, flashed past his granite eyes, even as he stared at her own. Glass and stone. She was glass right now, and all it would take was a single, viper-strike for her to shatter. A single flicker of the lashes, a single curl of the lip, a soft word brushed past the shell of her ear about how the human mind was so easily fooled....and she would be lost. Bertie would plead with her, clasp her hands, hold her cheek: and yet her smiles would be hollow, her laughs stilted, her mind striving to be with her Bertie and yet trapped, hopelessly entangled in the fear that he wasn’t real. Spiraling lower and lower till she was dashed to the ground, a burnt-out husk, a destroyed collection of splintered fragments.
Reid could do that. Become stone.
His feet moved forward. One step. Another. He knew the instant he stepped within five inches of her- his knuckles flexed in the air, skin heightened and pebbling over with goosebumps, ghost lips hauntingly fleeting over his jaw. He was a bare inch taller than her. It seemed too late to notice.
His right hand rose from his side, index finger outfolded, and its blunt nail traced its way from the outer corner of her eye all the way to the inner, scraping over the delicate skin. It probed at the corner of her eyelid, the place where crinkles probably burst out by the thousands when she laughed, and the salty water gave up its futile fight and released, clinging in turn to his fingertip. He wiped it away, letting her tear absorb its way past the roughened pad of his finger, sink into his skin.
“Your high opinion of me touches my heart.”
His hands sunk now, down, down on her shoulders, in a prising grip that was as hard as she expected it to be. He turned her around, inch by inch, till his chin was a centimetre over her shoulder, and his lower lip brushed her earlobe when he breathed.
They could see Bertie now, both of them, gold sunlight lingering on the bronze curls of his hair, a solid apparition casting a real shadow on the wan pool of light that bathed him. And he could glance back, and see Rika too, claw-like hands digging into her thighs, still on her knees because of course she didn’t have the strength to get up. But then she lifted her chin, and for a second, sunlight caught across her face too, illuminating sickly skin and darkened eyebags, above which hazel eyes glowed.
And another face flickered beneath his eyelids, blonde hair and healthy complexion and hazel eyes, and Reid let his breath loose, slithering past her ear right into her mind. “He’s real.”
And his hands let her go, because there was nothing else left. Familiar talons sunk their way past cotton and skin, hooking into his shoulders with pain that kept his mind clear, sane- and Reid glanced into the cold, flint-like eyes of his familiar. He turned, mind wiped blank, and walked, feet hitting against the floor in soft echoes that seeped meaninglessly into his ear, leaving the light behind. He wasn’t a creature of sunshine anyway. The gold light was metallic heat against his skin, the brutally honest rays casting his hair blacker and eyes colourless, paring the lines and shadows back from skin and bone. He was a child of storm, meant to walk in acid rain that purged and night that swallowed everything. Not here.
But something seized his wrist, and he stilled. His head looked to the side, and Rika was still on her haunches, leaning her head behind on the hard, stone wall. She was still looking ahead, looking at the reunion of brother and sister with caked, drying tear tracks burnt across her cheek- but her fingers around his wrist were deceptively strong, even if they were attached to a bird-boned wrist that looked fragile enough to snap with the slightest tug. Her lips weren’t flickering.
Reid didn’t free his hand. He didn’t even try. He stood, without words, without thought- watching two people reclaim their rightful happiness, while his sister held on to his hand.