He supposed he should be offended when the red headed witch with the nervy voice refers to him as that, but if he could calculate anything more likely to put steel in Diana's spine and send her walking over he can't account for it.
She knows it's a petty rebellion, knows he knows, even if she can feel his smile more than see it. No matter, it moved her from refusal to certain and there's something primal in him preening over her choosing him. In darker moments that worries him, but the craving is quieter in the here and now, enjoying the dappled sunshine and her light scent as she raps out a retort about opening her own door.
Despite the little café tucked away a short drive from the university grounds, despite intentions and plans and the imperceptible tensing of being that occurs when she's close, when she asked where we were going, there really wasn't any other answer.
"My house".
He suddenly can't share her.
She gives a short breath when she first steps inside, hands clenched lightly at her sides as if to remind her not to touch. Her pleasure pleases him more than it should. He fills the space between them with talk about the house, but his focus is on her slow perusal of this piece of living history he sometimes calls home. Though her questions hit upon the occasional sore spot (Who's she?) he wants her to know him in a way that belays the shortness of their acquaintance. Wants her to want to know him. She has no idea how much he's giving her; tales have power and even these brief pieces of it (De Clermont, I took my mother's name, my step-father Phillippe) would alarm those who've stood for him down the centuries.
It doesn't stop him though. There's something about her here, in this house, drifting from book to corner to step, that sets a spark to his blood. A phantom beat in his sluggish heart that thuds softly the deeper into the house and his life they go.
Matthew has served many purposes through the long line of his second life. He is no green boy to lose his head at the presence of a woman. But Diana sitting at his scarred work desk, a larger tome resting in a makeshift cradle of its smaller fellows as she gently turns the pages, is a sight that for a moment hangs timeless before him. A sighing in his bones says 'Mine'.
He stares longer than he should, her attention thankfully drawn by the illustration before her.
This woman, this life, they're intertwined now. And though he won't forget his purpose here, thought the witch herself creates far more questions than she answers, this moment when mere interest, when unsought craving, crystallized and whispered, 'Here. She belongs here'.
He absorbs this for a moment. Unexpected, but no less true for the consideration. Moves the conversation back into the familiar territory of 782 like his entire being hadn't just undergone an incremental shift. This quarry mustn't be spooked. Diana was born with certain truths, witch power threading through her veins surely as the blood he hears, blond hair and blue eyes (those blue eyes) and now, as he leads her back down the stones spilling truths like raindrops, a newfound certainty the two of them, however ill-timed, were born to mean something to the other.