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"How can you be so expressive but feel so little?"
It feels like it's just the two of them sitting in this little cave. Wisps of light stop at the entrance, as if a line between them and the outside world. He feels oddly out of place, even though he spends much of his time here; Kris lies on the dirty pebble floor, every slight movement of her elbow dragging a different outline through the rocks. It's almost silent except for the slow and steady dripping of spring water nearby.
Kris stops shifting when this question is asked.
He's never liked looking into her eyes; for some reason, he's always felt that her eyes never matched her. Her gait is always jaunty, her lips always quirked in some amused expression, her fingers expressively spread apart even when resting.
(Of course, that was before she ran away. Now no one knows her anymore; she is forgotten, even by the champions. It's as if she never existed. Only Silver knows the low, rich pitch of her jibes, the awkward sway of her hips, the half-lidded expressions anymore. Everything's changed. Silver even has his own life now, new rivals, ones that he has to regretfully admit, are more of a challenge than Kris ever was. It's as if her purpose in the world had ended. As if, suddenly, she was inconsequential, replaceable. An angel not fallen, but dimmed.)
Yet, something happened over the years. (Or maybe they were always this way, but he had deluded himself into hoping it wasn't so.)
Her eyes contain no expression; although the creases near her eye gather whenever she smiles, and although the bridge of her nose wrinkles whenever she finds something distasteful, it seems forced.
Kris is the nicest person he knows. Possibly the closest to an angel he's ever seen.
Are angels supposed to be heartless?
"...Hey, I don't think that's a question you should ask, Silver. One might think you actually cared," she says.
She makes no attempt to move, no motion to stand up; it's unsettling, to stand when someone else is lying down. A person lying down sees things they usually don't. He wonders just how much Kris can see from this angle, if she can see the rigid muscles in his back, if she can see the cement blocks locking his feet to the ground, making him unable to move. He wonders if angels see all either way.
"...Are you deflecting?"
A snort. Kris never snorts when she laughs. She snorts when she tries to pass things off as meaningless. Futile. Silly. Once upon a time, this knowledge of her would have scared Silver, would have caused him to push and kick her away, literally, until she was far away that he couldn't sense these things.
(One day, too far in the past for him to regret and too much in the present for him to forget, he looked her in the eye when he pushed her away and found nothing. He realized that this scared him even more than knowing.)
"..."
She doesn't answer. The topic won't be breached again for the rest of the night, even if it's clearly on both of their minds. He knows that she'll believe the conversation to be dropped, will think that her silence answers whatever question that he asks, will think that he'll believe her reluctance to answer is due to insecurity on her own part.
When she falls asleep with the carob dirt smudged against her cheek like clown's makeup, he'll sigh and carry her back to her home that only he knows.
She underestimates him, he knows. Has always underestimated him. He'll indulge her, always.
She'll always be his cruel, forgotten, glorious angel.
They both know the way she snuggles into his arms contentedly is something they'll never mention, that the way she clings onto his body when he finally lays her down in bed is something they both crave but can't have.
They both know that she's lying to herself, that she's pretending to feel insecurity about answering the question.
They both know that in reality, she just lost the incentive to, a long, long time ago.