Re: The Icarus/The Fallen
His hand came up to flutter like a dismissive bird’s wing, not at Enlil but at the hair-splitting, even while he was poring over the curiosities on the man’s shelves like tea leaves that spelled out secrets. It was fascinating, that one could make a home from a blank slate, just a room that trundled along on wheels. “I mean Paradise as a concept,” he murmured, his voice a low stack of breath against his ribs. His eyes narrowed as he reached out to touch the edge of the tiny mirror and feel the sharpness press a white line against his fingerprint. (Yes, he had them now. Fingerprints. All shades of extraordinary banalities, tonight.) “I fear I explained myself poorly, I don’t have much of a grasp on philosophy. I’ve had a hundred thousand lifetimes of believing what I was told.”
He looked askance at Enlil in the close quarters of the cabin, indulging himself in the man’s life where it’d been scribbled in the margins behind just a single closed door. Privately, he thought Enlil too large a force to be logically contained within four walls, barely wider than his arms’ span. “But it seems you might be,” he said, and the edges of his frown flicked up for a second, augmenting a shrewd little smile that just barely reached his eyes. It certainly didn’t warm them any, but perhaps softened them around the edges. The man did sound like an academic or a poet, espousing the tangle of Paradise and wretched duality. Nathaniel shook his head.
“I’ve only existed for - ” he broke off midway through his explanation to glance around for a clock, and failing that, leaned toward the window and peered through the gauze of the curtain at the place where the moon hung in the sky, swollen heavy. “Fifteen, sixteen hours? I’ve seen little past my own shortcomings.”
And when Enlil held out his hand, he didn’t hesitate to place his own there, palm up and fingers relaxed and curled slightly. “But you don’t like us,” he said, with less apprehension than he felt. He was not worried about the sting of metal in his skin, he’d told the truth in that. It was Enlil’s shifting expression that he feared. That it might curdle from smooth cream into something sour.
Nathaniel felt his stomach flip. When had he become a worm who so desperately wanted validation from a stranger? He looked down at their hands. “Go ahead.”