song of dolls and wings

"Titans, that's horrible, Rella."

But Flora's tone was not scolding; rather, it was pitying, scared.

"You won't judge me?"

Flora frowned, curling and unfurling fists of her small, cold hands. "I suppose I don't know how."

Come now. Everyone knew how to judge a sinner and a hypocrite. Even those much less wise and quick than Flora, whose nidia eyes dulled at the thought of such treachery.

"You have your own sense of justice," Rella reminded her. "It is your place and yours alone to decide your opinion of me."

As if Rella were goading Flora toward her own freedom and safe standing, and not toward the righteous honor of persecution.

It didn't matter how carefully Flora had combed her long, thick bangs. Rella had caught a glimpse of her third eye, lidded but sensitive, and it only further diminished any point she saw in a vain self-defense.

Something of ill-ease about her. Something deceptively dangerous about her wide-wrapping wings and alabaster affect. Something that reminded, inexorably, of what little difference it truly made what posture one put on, as a scion or a nursemaid of their tribe.

"And what if it had been you?" Rella felt the chill in her voice as she asked it, an unsubtle challenge that almost feinted snide.

Flora could not be diminished for long, however. Her own response warmed and thrilled to the light of an easy, decisive answer.

"I would have done just as you had. Knowing that doing otherwise wouldn't really have saved anybody."

Saving people. When you put it into that perspective...

"You must be the best of us, Flora," Rella replied wonderingly, shaking her head. "What a strange creature..."

If Flora knew all what that rhetorical phrase could mean, she didn't let on. Indeed, she was quite clever, that way.