Afraid.The damning accuracy of his accusation rendered Elisabeth silent for a moment.
This had been a tactical retreat, one designed based on what she'd privately observed of him: his relentless dedication to the region, his emphasis on duty and service, and the unspoken fact that she was by far one of the more insigificant ways he spent his own time.
Somehow, she'd forgotten that he'd observed her, too. That for all of herself that she had withheld from him, he knew private truths of her, whether or not he'd ever voiced them.
Hadn't he been the first of them to instigate whatever this was between them?
Hadn't she only ever been brave enough to reach out to him from far away, through the safety of distance?
Hadn't he always been the one to visit her, never receiving a visit in return until this very moment?
And even now, wasn't she consumed with fear that he would have done to her what he had done to
Lulu Flint?
Her gaze lowered to the wedding band on her left hand, fingers winding absently around the golden thorns of the poisoner's ring. They retracted ever so subtly, awaiting enough pressure for the venomous spikes beneath the metallic rosette's petals to flower, but never receiving it.
Some said that poison was the coward's weapon, and it was the one Elisabeth had made her signature trademark. Fitting, she supposed.
"...Not all of us have things that make us brave," Elisabeth said finally, exhaling. She'd envied that part of him in the Petalburg Woods, too: his willingness to throw aside his own weakness in the face of whatever obstacles came, accepting the perils of adversity rather than running to the safety of the shadows.
To some degree,
FERNANDO SILPH was facing her in that way, now. Giving her a kind exit, one that she could and should take swiftly and gratefully, before she said something she regretted. There was a sort of nobility to the gesture, in a way.
She'd accepted his first defamation of her character, resigning herself to its uncomfortable truth.
His second implication, however, struck like a well-placed arrow for all its unexpected cruelty.
"Is that what I seem like to you?" Elisabeth asked without thinking, turning her attention to him before she could regain her composure. Her voice came out wounded, stung; her fingers tightened their grip around her ring, threatening to reveal poisonous intention.
Whatever their carefully curated masks of politeness and vanity had been, they'd both shed them in the night. In the darkness, neither had asked for the story that each other's body had shared, unspoken.
Her hands had known the jagged scar that bisected his body in two, and countless other scars besides, as his had known the warped flesh of her thigh, whispering of other hands that had held her to flames.
Perhaps some part of him had wanted to hurt her, in this moment, the way that she'd hurt him.
"Am I a woman who avoids unsightliness and disfigurement, Fernando?"The raw pain in her answer revealed he had succeeded.
