Just a short drabble that's been sitting on my hard drive for far too long. Finished it to get it out of the way, and my head, so I can focus on the multichapters. :)
"You shouldn't stand so close to the edge."
She flinches, not because he startled her. She sensed him coming, one of the creatures indigenous to this realm. He is a human. Like her mother was.
"You could fall." He says, edging closer as a sharp gust kicks up. Her fingers clutch the cloak around her, tight enough to the point of white knuckles, so her eerie skin is not revealed. Cautiously, she glances up, under the heavy cover of her hood, to look at him.
He is young. Her age, chronologically, but she feels so much older, and so much younger, all at once. There is a peculiar covering over his eyes, hiding them, his emotions even further hidden under a more complicated mask of stoic but approachable composure. His head is angled slightly to the side, his aura curious. It seems like he is always that way.
She averts her eyes fast as a whipcrack when a smile edges it's way onto his lips, trying at something like comforting and friendly all at once, and not quite getting there, as if he doesn't know how. She tightens her muscles, standing rigid before the low brick wall that surrounds the edge of the roof with gargoyles at each corner. His eyes are still on her. She cannot see them, but she can feel his gaze. Calculating.
"So, why are you up here?" He says, leaning his back against the wall. she glances at him again, watches the comfortable way he relaxes against the bricks, as if he is completely at home. She knows humans cannot fly, nor pass through solid matter. How is it he is not afraid?
She says nothing.
"I know it's not for the view. Gotham's the ugly twin sister of the five boroughs, all grime and mobsters." He mutters, almost as if thinking out loud. "Maybe you just needed a place to think?"
She agrees with that, somewhat.
"I like to come up here when I need some time away, too. I've always liked this church... kinda reminds me of what Christmas with my family used to be like."
His voice and aura turned slightly sad then, but brightened again, slowly. She wonders what this 'Christmas' is.
"But it's not just that. Being up here, even with all the light pollution, it makes me feel closer to the stars. Like I could reach up and touch them." He said wistfully, turning his head upwards to look at the white dots in the night sky, clear after the snowclouds moved away. She looks up as well, the only sign she'd heard him at all.
"I never do, though. Because if I try to fly, I'll just fall."
She ponders the depressing overtones of those words for a moment, puzzling at the inconcruous hope in his aura. Before he has a chance to elaborate, something chirps. He pulls a device from his belt, and frowns at it with a sigh. Pulls something else out of his belt and places the first back where it was, looks up at her.
"Please don't jump."
He smiles at her, with a slight pleading in his voice. He is gone in the next second, firing some device from a handle clenched in his fist and swinging out of sight. She stares at where he stood, and begins to smile, the muscles around her mouth twitching from disuse, and speaks.
"I won't.