[Now, that’s a familiar sight. A familiar color, too, with a newfound sparkling twinkle of gold twined through the fabric. Ardyn lifts it up gently between forefinger and thumb, the rest of the scarf pooled neatly in the box, and — despite everything — a smile of a more sincere sort cracks along his features.]
Oh, you know me all too well, dear friend. That any sort of scarf will not go amiss, not when it comes from you.
[He says it with a teasing lilt, but something in his gut cannot quite make it all that prodding. He’s remembering now, keenly, what he had felt on that day during their time on El Nysa — how he had been strangely caught-off guard by anyone giving him a gift, how he had not known how to parse it; easier to tuck it away in some dark corner of his mind, in that deep mire of regret and hatred, and forget about what it might mean to have someone who cares.
Leveling amber eyes back to X’rhun, he’s struck with that same feeling, but now he has nowhere to hide it. Tired as he is, all the life wrung out of him in those thousands of years, the betrayal of the gods and family and destiny alike, he is still unable to find a place to partition away the treacherously warm feeling blooming across his insides.
(That should be terrifying. Maybe it is, in a way; easy enough to recall the other world they visited, too, that city of New Amsterdam and its dreams, and how he had balked at the revelations unearthed when X’rhun visited his own. How scared he had been.)
And yet, with a beat of silence uncharacteristic for Ardyn, as if he is struck by the thoughts in his head and not the reality he stands in now, he holds out his hand and offers the scarf to the other.]
no subject
Oh, you know me all too well, dear friend. That any sort of scarf will not go amiss, not when it comes from you.
[He says it with a teasing lilt, but something in his gut cannot quite make it all that prodding. He’s remembering now, keenly, what he had felt on that day during their time on El Nysa — how he had been strangely caught-off guard by anyone giving him a gift, how he had not known how to parse it; easier to tuck it away in some dark corner of his mind, in that deep mire of regret and hatred, and forget about what it might mean to have someone who cares.
Leveling amber eyes back to X’rhun, he’s struck with that same feeling, but now he has nowhere to hide it. Tired as he is, all the life wrung out of him in those thousands of years, the betrayal of the gods and family and destiny alike, he is still unable to find a place to partition away the treacherously warm feeling blooming across his insides.
(That should be terrifying. Maybe it is, in a way; easy enough to recall the other world they visited, too, that city of New Amsterdam and its dreams, and how he had balked at the revelations unearthed when X’rhun visited his own. How scared he had been.)
And yet, with a beat of silence uncharacteristic for Ardyn, as if he is struck by the thoughts in his head and not the reality he stands in now, he holds out his hand and offers the scarf to the other.]
Tie it for me?