13 / feathers
Violence is easy. She knows he's accustomed to explosive magic, surges of energy that give his spells the devastation of size. He can lose his temper and rattle all the kitchen cabinets with the gnarling of his fingers. He can throw a fit and send a message. Cast a bucket of patiently awaited sap flying, metal and all, into the air like Old Faithful and back down seeping into the dirt, to her utter disappointment. And sure, these outbursts are impressive. Especially when he starts fires. She likes starting fires sometimes too. But what is he really accomplishing?
Smaller spells require precision. Patience. Control. Things he sorely lacks. He has trouble, for instance, with the feather charm. He can shred a pillow without any qualms and hurl all its goose down into the air, and indeed it all will float and whirl with a kind of ferocity above their heads. It's the trick of manipulating a single feather with his will that seems to elude him. It will rise, but then just quivers. What is it about the tender act of coaxing a single feather to dance?
They sit on the floor in the evening with a butchered pillow between them.
"You're going too hard," she tells him. "Reel it in."
"I can't!"
"It's like whispering, but with your magic."
"I—ugh—fuck you."
'"You can do it."
She understands now more than ever why this was one of the first tricks Grams taught her. It's easy beginner magic, for one, but it requires essential skills for using bigger spells sensibly. It's no wonder Kai's craft is the way that it is. But he has the one thing she knows will help him improve, and that's devotion. If only he can channel it into humility the way he's channeled it into embedding himself in her life.
He gives up. Flings an armful of feathers to the side and retreats to the loft. She's never seen someone climb a ladder so angrily in her life. Looking after him, she wonders if she's made a mistake, letting him closer.
The change in sleeping arrangements admittedly requires an adjustment phase. That morning, she was the first to rise and get started outside. When she went back in to get coffee, she happened upon a whisp of his wet and naked body sprinting from the bathroom to the ladder. His hands flew to his crotch and they both froze, she in the doorway, he with his back up against the nearest wall. Bonnie, stunned, didn't say a word.
"I forgot to bring down my towel," he had explained, but it still begs the question: why not cloak himself to go and get it?
She begins sweeping up feathers with her hands. They haven't talked about their morning run-in all day. Hopefully it won't come up at all and she will eventually disremember that flash of panic-penis. Though it has swept up some idle curiosity she thought she'd buried underneath the figurative rug after watching him chop firewood. Water dripping from his hair down his exposed chest, the headlights in his eyes, vulnerability gathering his brow line like nothing else she's seen before... She ducked and covered her gaze for him to climb the ladder—"No peeking!"—and fetch the blasted towel, her eyes wide and watering on the wet footprints drying on the hardwood in his wake.
No. Wait. That isn't right.
She has seen that vulnerable look before.
He wore it in the rave when he apologized.
She didn't believe him then. But she is getting to know the way each muscle in his face twists when he says or claims to feel something. That brow-gathering is an atypical but now twice-spotted thing. Like a rare disease, an endangered skink. It is something to be sought and studied for better understanding.
She dumps the feathers into a pillowcase and climbs the ladder after him.
Kai sits on the edge of the bottom bunk, fists on his knees, his eyes closed. He looks meditatively pissed. Bonnie, tentative, walks across the floor to stand in front of him and put her hand on his shoulder, she doesn't know why. She will not give him any more vocal encouragement, but she'll settle on this, some way to transfer some measure of her empathy, or feel his anger like the warmth radiating off of him.
When his eyes open and he looks up at her, there is such meanness in them, it unnerves her. She doesn't deserve to have his frustration directed at her. She has always known this. Knowing it, she does not crumble to her knees like she might if he were someone with the emotional power over her to make her doubt herself. This is why they work, she thinks. He has nothing to hold over her. Her reflex for withholding affection keeps her safe. Her affection is as light as a feather.