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The question comes out of nowhere.
“Do you really believe that I’ve changed?”
Azura is on her bed, reading over something Topaz had sent her ages ago and she’d never quite gotten to properly reading — but with a new guest at her home and no instructions to leave Fairytown anytime soon, this afternoon had seemed a wonderful time to sit down and start. It is poetry, or something like it. Azura thinks Topaz wrote it herself, and has summoned a quill over to take notes to offer feedback for whenever she’ll next see the other guardian.
Dahlia watches her with keen, unreadably blank eyes as the quill floats to her hand, sparkles dimming as it settles between forefinger and thumb. Rests at her middle finger, dainty against her knuckle. She itches to write something, but Dahlia’s heavy stare pushes away her last thought, and so she sets down the quill in quiet surrender.
They had finished their lunch hours ago, and yet Dahlia is still sitting at the very same place she had been then — still, statuesque, stiff. Obscenely out of place in the lived-in setting of Azura’s home. She closes her book — Topaz will understand if she takes some days more — and meets Dahlia’s eyes, steel reflecting in hers.
“Well,” begins Azura, rather simply, “I’ve invited you into my home.”
“Exactly. Inviting a follower of Laverna into your home?” Dahlia doesn’t allow for even a breath of a beat before she snaps her response, and Azura is only a little surprised by how bitter the other sounds — not towards the guardian, but herself.
“I could hurt you,” she continues, when Azura does not interrupt in the short pause, the bitterness fading into a small, withdrawn perplexity that Azura only really notices in her voice after Dahlia’s eyebrows pull slightly together, too, a subconscious betrayal of distress.
Dahlia is as physically reactive as she thinks she isn’t — stoic on the outside, with a sensitive heart that even she has forgotten to time. Hurt has surrounded it well enough that it is mistaken for cruelty, apathy — and often willfully taken as such at a glance. After all, Dahlia was by Laverna’s side for so long — the desire to see her as evil persists even if she claims reformation, claims a desire to do better. Perhaps she is a lost cause. Perhaps they should focus on things beyond one disillusioned follower begging for a forgiveness that the Guardians so rarely like to give.
Perhaps evil once means evil forever, and Dahlia should be no exception to their long-lasting rule.
And yet.
“You could hurt me,” Azura repeats. Agrees. Dahlia’s eyes flicker between hers, back and forth, left to right to left. Azura marvels quietly at how they are close enough for her to see this — to recognise the doubt and disappointment already washing over Dahlia in waves.
She continues, lifting her quill to gesture faintly towards Dahlia, “But you won’t.”
Dahlia goes quiet. Azura doesn’t push it; instead, she is the first to break their complex eye contact, using Topaz’s poetry as a way to feign moving on. On from the conversation; on from the concern Dahlia tiptoes around like fragmented ice both of them willfully pretend to be unable to hear cracking beneath her feet. Azura reads the same lines without absorbing them, until Dahlia’s voice, soft, stirs the air once more.
“I won’t.”
Ever elegant, Azura only nods. She twirls her quill with faux nonchalance, flowing its feather to hide the adoring delight that dances giddily in her eyes. In her periphery, Dahlia smiles, a shroud of guilt lifting from her eyes like sunshine finally striking dark clouds.