Re: The antique store: Ella & Will
Will knew strangers in strange lands. Intimately well, in that he'd been him, rather than the familiar acquainted with all customs and traditions. He was tall, and he was spindly and he was exceptionally white and all these things had stood out significantly where he'd been. But he didn't think the woman - girl, really, he assessed her age as somewhere in that bracket of ambiguity - really meant that.
"It's colorful." And the problem of all that awful coiling itself around serpentine was that Will's pupils were oil-dark when he looked at her in that thin face, he was bloodless and his eyes were starred out with smoke and dust and blood recent enough to leave him lucid and he felt - it had to be said it was fanciful because fancy had never made a difference before - somehow more sure-footed arm and arm (or arm and shoulder) in step with her than he had before.
"I could scoop, but I couldn't promise to do so in a way that delivered you to your door unharmed. But I'm from here," Will declined to answer where exactly he'd been in the interim. Here was where his mother was - or had been and here he would be. Here was where he'd be forever, because he'd decided that it was too risky, now, to go far.
"You're not a local at all. Where are you from?" Poppies dilated out of nothing and Will looked half-slanted from his shoulder but poppies were nothing when you inhaled magic the night before. Poppies he might have done himself, and nobody was much bothered about poppies cropping up. He didn't think it was him but it was troubling nonetheless. He looked at her, the spray of freckles over her nose. She looked harmless.