When you are alone, you get used to the silence. You burrow, deeper and deeper, like some insect, compulsively twisting toward the safety of the heart of the wood. Often with delusions of coming out of hibernation, eventually. Of enjoying the warmth of a hearth.
And everyone digging in to search for you is a predator; an assailant. You must protect your home. You are the borrowing wasp. The sting of loneliness is nothing compared to the lash of the bitter wind outside. You prefer the frost on the inside.
You were a foolish wasp, emerging before your time, entranced by the promise of succulents. Hope. Foolish.
Oh, stop your caterwauling, Thomas’ voice reprimands in his head, crystal clear. You were always such a maudlin character. So the boy is changeable and fickle. Aren’t you so? The only constant this ever-eternal concoction of self-hatred and self-pity.
We mustn’t forget the anger - Miranda’s voice now. The sorrow-fed fire that animates his living corpse. Oh, what a sin, to have been back to the world of the living, if ever so briefly. No heart left to be broken and yet...
Leave off, James replies, affecting his best mental lowborn accent.
He continues to stare at Silver, sleeping fitfully on his window sill. Like the canary he is.
A one-legged canary can still sing. And sing he would, in his newly appointed role as quartermaster...
Much as Flint would prefer to see a viper, he’s having trouble doing it while Silver lays in this convalescent state.
His breath fast and shallow, like the small bird’s. He looks so breakable and hollow, fluttering in and out of existence. Flint yearns for the tingle in his fist signalling a desire to crush but he’s left confused at the pull to protect, instead. To nurse back to health, so he can be subject to his deceitful singing once more.
Silver opens his eyes and Flint can see the bitterness and fury out in the open, ordinarily so carefully concealed. A bitterness and fury to match his own.
He knows birds eat wasps.
