What Now?

[Oriena]

Anger was an emotion she knew well. It surged and overspilled inside her, not all of it anything to do with the here-and-now, though Ori neither articulated nor paused to dissect the reasons for that fury. She snarled when he yanked her inside the threshold. Didn’t resist though. Her eyes blazed, caught on the familiar precipice between sex and war. She wouldn’t have resisted either path, so long as action came with commitment. Weakness and hesitation would both snap under that glare, no question. But then no one called on Ori expecting pity or comfort.

The words didn’t matter, and Nox always spoke too many of them at the best of times, so she barely listened. Instead she found herself hating the emotionlessness in his voice, the hollowness in his eyes. Once this had been about coaxing the darkness of his affliction, pulling him down a path he was reluctant to go. Now that parasitic edge had gone, yet neither was this the Nox he had been before the horde. This was something lost. A broken boy. Oriena broke plenty of her things, but it was never usually in meaningless destruction. And she didn’t like it when something else did the breaking first.

She didn’t overthink it. She didn’t choose to think at all in the moment. Ultimately it didn’t matter, and if she doubted she could make any dent in the void consuming him, it didn’t stop her reaching for the flame to see how badly it’d hurt. Fury was easy to channel into passion and recklessness, and they’d never held back with each other; pleasure, pain, or release.