excerpt - sour grapes
response prompt - wip, please refrain from critique at this time
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Being offered another's name cut him deeply, as much as it frightened. The gesture--a direct violation of law--seemed a heartless jest made at his expense, and no matter how swiftly he fled from the offer, he could not purge the lingering memory of how the korusian looked at him instead of through him, or how grey hands briefly rested, weighted, against his shoulders to steady him.
He insisted to himself he memorised the queer little incident as proof only of one boy's ignorant cruelty, but he lied as well as he feigned disinterest--clumsily--and so the next day found him right back at the korusian's well where the backs of his thighs pressed to the edge and the stone bricks dug in past layers of cloth.
In truth, he nervously awaited a glimpse of lavender braids neatly plaited, or the rustle of a cloak sung from ashen feathers and iron scales.
When the day waned from early light to late afternoon, he relented to his disappointment and inwardly berated himself for a fool and more. Then a voice called, cracking with the green of adolescence--as his once did--and brimming with an annoying amount of impertinence.
He turned his face away as before--not to treat the young drake as the other korusians treated himself, but to hide the warmth heating his dark face in a slow and embarrassing burn.
He pointedly studied his hands for some time. In other circumstances, he never so much as glanced at his hands--he hated their softness, and sorely missed the budded pads that once sheathed thorny talons. If he looked elsewhere, however, he risked answering to a terrifying amount of attention he did not grasp how to deal with.
The demand slithered through his teeth in spite of efforts to contain it. "Why are you here?" he hissed, resentment coiled thick and poisonous within his ruined throat.
The glance he earned--glimpsed out of the corner of his vision between one rasped breath and the next--caused him to wonder whether he spat his venom at the wrong target, or if it mattered, when he no longer recalled any other way to be.
"I said it before: this is my spot."
"Find a new one."
"What?" Laughter thrummed with this answer, in a rustle of feathers and quivered shoulders. "And miss out on making a friend?"