ol worried about the girl's health as her flesh cycled between pallor and inferno red. When he took her hands the reaction was so striking and immediate that the young warrior half expected that he'd harmed the faunus girl somehow. She was blushing so hard that Sol could feel the warmth radiating from her dilated blood vessels as distinctly as he would the draft of an open furnace, and if she wasn't careful she was going to burst a blood vessel or something. Were it not for the breadth of her smile, which displayed mouthful of sparkling white teeth that were as slender and sharp as their owner, Sol would have thought the girl was afraid, or too petrified to resist. As it was however, that smile, and the coloring of her flesh combined in a set of cues that the one eyed lord recognized from trawling the taverns in distant nations.

Lily liked him, in a way that attractive women liked attractive men. This realization also marked the first time that Sol suspected that their meeting had not been chance after all. While normally he would have been annoyed or worried by that possibility, as long as the girl kept smiling like that at him, he didn't think he would care if she turned out to be an assassin sent by the former heir to the throne of Rift. It was not simply the fact that she was apparently happy that made Sol adore that expression, nor was it simply how it made every individual feature of her feline visage shine with the essence of joy, a feat that Sol could not match with all his effort united. Sol adored that smile primarily because it was for him. Somehow he'd drawn that smile out and for the moment it was his alone.

Despite how prior to entering the shop, he'd done as much as was within his power, save surrendering to the horrible little voice in his head, that could drive the cat away, she had stalked right on after him. Perhaps it was just to get access to the components he had suggested for her weapon, and perhaps it was all a farce to make him lower his guard. But even if that was the case, Sol would have paid a hundred sheets of hand crafted myomer for such a beautiful lie. He did not want her to stop smiling, and when she did, he knew now that he'd seen her beaming like a grinning sunrise, part of him would spend every moment thereafter waiting for the sunshine to return.

It made him think of standing on the slopes of the mountain into which his family's ancestral fortress had been carved. It made him think of that magical moment, when the distant peaks ahead cradled the sun as it ascended towards the new day, while the swooping moon seemed to perch upon the peaks behind. It was a phenomenon that happened only a handful of times every year, when the lunar cycle was perfectly aligned with that of the sunrise, and only visible from the exact spot at the foot of the ramparts that lead towards the mountain fortress of House Moon. It was an event of such anticipation and awe that it never failed to meet expectation, a private rendezvous between the silver mistress and the golden master, a moment of intimacy between the beings of the heavens.

That's what Lily's smile made Sol think of.

It did not startle him when her aura appeared. The invading sense of security and peace did not frighten his mind this time, because Lily's awkward joy, and her schoolgirl shyness, had already imparted a much firmer sensation of both. This time, the forces of wrath and ire that filled his rotten mind laid aside their arms for the moment and tolerated the coming flood of serenity without complaint. It might have been there all along for all Sol knew.

The cloth might have moved, or it might not. Sol would never know, because he had not been watching some dull piece of polymer. He was watching Lily's eyes, and in their reflection he saw how small and fragile her hands looked in his, and he saw that she was not afraid, she was comforted. It stunned him, and struck so deeply that he could feel his heart aching. Nothing, not hell, nor beast, could have torn his attention away from that. It was the first time he'd even imagined himself as anything but an implement of fear and death.

He could have stared at his reflection for a hundred years in a pond of mirror, and never have seen anything but his scars, his sins, and the weapon that life had turned him into. But that same image, viewed through the lens of some stranger urchin girl, despite being identical in every way, did not seem like it needed to be any of those things.

He was not suddenly a different person, nor did he have some sort of epiphany, for those things only happened in the book Sol had read when he was young and dreamed of being a hero one day. Only magic could undo what he was, but for an instant, he felt a single spark of hope that was so brief, so small, and gone so suddenly as it had appeared that it may have been an illusion.

When Lily looked up from their hands, she did not get to see the emotion in Sol's eye, and whether it was approval, or something else, would remain lost to all but Corporal Kelly, who was still watching the two youngsters intently. What she did see was a face that was so hard that it might break like cooked clay if it tried to imitate the smile she wore, with a curtain of dark hair casting shade in the glow of her aura, across his brow and eye, mouth set into a severe expression that fit as tightly as a mask. That light of hers seemed to make all his shadows seem even dark, and even the vibrant shade of his brilliant golden eye was swallowed in the pools of black.

"It will take time. I can do what I showed you, because, I've spent more than twelve hours of every day of the past five years practicing that skill." He explained flatly, watching the girl's face from within his veil of shadows, experiencing each triumph and disappointment with each slight frown of soft feminine lips and each return of her glowing smile.

He continued to hold onto her hands, because he sensed that somehow it was helping to motivate the task, and also because he wanted to. He did not want to let go for as long as he could make it last, for reasons that were all new and strange to his mind, but not unwelcome.

tag(s): lilywilde ━ words: 000 ━ notes: please keep it short

here was something strangely amusing about watching someone try to manipulate a square of cloth with nothing but the force of their own will. Though truth be told, Lily was doing much better than Sol had the first time he'd tried to activate a strand of myomer. Of course, Sol had not enjoyed the support of someone to literally hold his hand as he tackled the task, and likely would have responded violently if anyone had tried to offer it.

Twitching feline ears made Sol want to lay a hand upon them, to soother them into stillness, and knitted brow beginning to bead with effort made him suspect that the girl was going to faint if she didn't relax a bit. It was quite a bit of fun to watch, and he did not concern himself with the question of his part in this. He was perfectly willing to stand there all day, for as long as the girl's patience for her futile effort lasted. Rome was not built in a day, and what looked like momentary successes was just as likely to be flukes of random chance, anomalies from the unsteady and unfamiliar mission to which she was bending her will.

Controlling the fabric was a process as complex as learning to walk, and required a seed of instinct, a lifetime of practice, and millions of moment to moment micro-adjustments to master. One could not tell someone how to walk, the best one could do is show someone what walking looked like, and be patient as they figured out the rest. That being said, Sol found that his well of patience was being replenished by the experience, as apposed to depleted. He wondered if it had anything to do with bathing in the gentle glow of the cat's aura.

She triggered a reaction that seemed to please her, though Sol regarded it indifferently, as only Lily knew what she was trying to accomplish, and to Sol's eye the sudden stiffening of the sheet was impossible to distinguish from the hundred random jerks and ripples that had proceeded it. Still, the pride was clear on her face, and that pleased the young lord all the same.

He would have preferred if that had been the total of it, but the distraction of her small achievement seemed to trigger something in Lily's mind, and Sol did not have to hear the clanking to know that gears were turning. A meaningful glance at his right hand, where it's frigid digits, as dead as hearthstones, gently supported her slender and vibrantly alive hands, told Sol all he needed to know about what the girl had managed to sift out of his words. He'd not meant to deceive her, it was simply that he concealed his disabilities as best he could as a matter of habit and upbringing. One did not strut about, parading one's weaknesses for all to see unless one was so without honor as to seek purification beneath a flood of shame.

Lily did not seemed bothered by her suspicion, but all the same, Sol released her hand from the grasp of his right, and with a great deal of effort he imitated natural movement as he left the appendage fall to his side.

Her words confirmed that she thought that something didn't add up perfectly, and much to Sol's relief, she did not request an explanation, something that would have shamed him deeply.

He swallowed, and forced his lips to curl into a smile. It looked like the kind of thing an artist would paint with only a verbal description of the subject. Sol's smile, while a perfect imitation of the real thing, as far as shape and inflection went, had an uncanny quality that was not entirely genuine. He was not smiling because he was happy, though somewhere deep in a soul pockmarked by abuse, he was happy to hear that Lily wanted to spend more time with him. He was smiling because what he said next would sound sarcastic if he didn't.

"I think I would like that too."

His voice was cool soft crackle just above a whisper, like fresh snow beneath a boot heel. His smile did not touch his eye, but the emotion that twinkled in that golden sphere did not render the display insincere either. He interpreted that to mean that their time was coming to a close, as he would have to return to his afternoon classes at some point.

He did not know how long he and Lily had stood there, her hands warm and soft in his, but he was certain that his free period would be at an end any minute now. He regretted it. But his duties had demanded far worse of him in recent memory, and it was a small regret by comparison.

His chest felt hollow, and his head like it would float away, and he felt familiar sadness amidst the joy for this rare and strange moment that the two of them had shared. He filled that void with cigarette smoke, and spat the remains of the charred filter to his left. It didn't help, it only felt like it did.

His left hand squeezed hers for a brief moment, leaving behind a lingering suggestion of the strength of his grasp. He was about to turn away, or say something that would make the parting easier, but then he had a better idea.

His right hand, scooped up the sheet of myomer in from her fingers, balancing the woven fibers on the point of a rigid and icy gloved finger as they slipped from the faunus' grasp. He concentrated on the way being forced to leave the girl and return to his life made him feel. He collected the frustration, the regret, and a thousand other voices that eroded the granite heart in his chest until one day it would be nothing but a pebble. With the core of his being, blackened and worn by fire and fury, he grasped those sentiments so tightly that they were crushed together into a single writhing mass of blackness.

His right hand glowed with eldritch flame. Crawling tongues of liquid red, and rising tendrils of abysmal blue surrounded his fingers, and the air began to stink of the warring scents of fine spices and pungent brimstone. The uncanny flames suffused the square of polymer, insinuating and slithering between and through the fibers until the entire sheet writhed like a living, and clearly suffering, thing.

Sol concentrated, so hard that sweat beaded on his brow, and his jaw set into a hard line that made his teeth creak audibly. His smile turned into a sneer of effort, as if he were trying to us his mind as a crank to jack up a tank. Then it happened.

It began simply at first, as the myomer creased from one corner to the other and folded stiffly until two corners touched and it flattened into a triangle balanced on his index finger. Then the triangle folded in half again, and then in unison the four chambers of the folded sheet opened and creased in complex and peculiar ways, as points and shapes folded themselves and unfolded, creating more intricate designs until the original shape was lost entirely. It lasted for just a bit less than a minute, the fabric creasing, folding, then reversing, points sinking into and rising from the mass at the bidding of a seemingly random design. Finally the once square sheet was a densely folded diamond that occupied a mere fraction of the original's size.

Sol let his golden eye rise from the peculiar shape to find Lily's grey eyes, shining silver in their combine lights and looking just like the moon itself. Then, the multiple points that had collected at the peak of the diamond peeled back, causing the entire shape to swell and broaden and open as more material was pulled out of the central mass. In under a second, the shapeless mass went from an unidentifiable collection of folded fabric, to a stylized representation of a small blue flower, rendered in stiff folds and creases or military grade polymer.

Sol seemed out of breath from the effort as he presented the small artificial flower to the girl.

"I think I would like that a lot."

tag(s): lilywilde ━ words: 000 ━ notes: please keep it short