Interim Chancellor
Location: I am the idiot
Tags:
Sibylla Abrantes
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Cassian Abrantes
Aurelian's breath hitched the moment her fingers wrapped around his wrist. The contact sent a jolt through him sharper than pain, grounding and arresting. His body tensed instinctively, ready to tear away, ready to guard what pride he had left. But she didn't release him. When Sibylla's hand seized the blade and wrenched it from his grasp, he didn't resist. The vibroknife hit the ground with a metallic crack that echoed through the rain like the closing of a door.
Then her hands found his face. It was enough to undo him.
Aurelian went still beneath her touch, trembling as her palms cupped his jaw. The pressure of her thumbs against his bruised skin, the warmth cutting through the cold rain, stripped him bare. He didn't flinch when she called him an idiot, didn't even smirk. His eye flicked down to hers, fractured amber against the storm. For the first time all night, he looked young, like a boy who'd been fighting ghosts since birth, not the dangerous Chancellor or the Veruna heir.
Her words burned through him, each one cutting too close: "You are more than your temper… more than your hate." He wanted to believe her, but the truth sat like iron in his chest. Thunder rolled above them, and the mask slipped further, just enough for the raw vulnerability underneath to break through.
"You saw me," he said quietly, words catching in his throat. "You saw what I am." His voice cracked, a low, bitter rasp. "The way you looked at me, like I was some monster that crawled out of the dirt."
He leaned into her touch without realizing it, the movement instinctive, desperate. Rain slicked through their joined hands, cold and hot all at once. "You were right to," he muttered. "Because I would've done it. I wanted to." His jaw clenched hard enough to draw fresh blood from his split lip.
"I don't know how to stop, Sibylla. Every time he speaks, every time he looks at me like I'm beneath him, I feel it. That rage. And to see you hurt and he couldn't care less..." He pulled back just enough for her to see the fear in his eyes, not defiance. "You tell me I can be better, but what if I can't? What if this is all I am?"
Aurelian's voice softened, hollow but trembling with something close to surrender. "Because I swear to Shiraya, if you're wrong about me… if you look at me like that again…" He trailed off, shaking his head, water dripping from his hair like tears. "I don't think I'll survive it."
The rain kept falling, relentless, washing away the blood between them but not the truth that clung beneath it.
