She fell like his heart. Iris, who'd not been anything else since her conception, couldn't move in a way that wasn't lovely to him. He was fast becoming expectant, spoiled. He laughed in his throat, and it was bitter. The nymph he could treat poorly, because the nymph wanted it. He didn't know, though she displayed it well, that it was his own confusion that hurt her more than the excruciatingly expensive floor, rushing up to meet her. The bought flower that they'd let him pluck. He felt affection toward her, but it wasn't the kind that shielded her from vengeance.<br/><br/>He was growing into his role, and was about to roar something at her, like her compliance was wrong in some way, and her voice was too sweet in agreement. An unfettered beast, fed and sustained by its own wants, unchecked and corrupted in the Eden of his own house. But when he twisted to be the worst adversary to his sweetest heroine, his blood in her faltered like water does when winter comes too soon. Naella, not the ghost of the girl, but the pretty soft thing herself, wronged.<br/><br/>Their distance was impossible for even his forever arm, but he reached for her as she trailed. "Nuh..." It was uncanny. She was too idiosyncratic to be anyone else. The real sin today - and he'd killer her, once - was that in that blink he'd forgotten about his flower girl. Kedrick ran after her and twisted her around to make her pale hair skirt like her sunday dress when she looked for him in his suit, and mother was growing tired of their antics while smiling.<br/><br/>"It's not you." he said and wrung her arm to keep her in place. He laughed. It was like an eloquent bird, but out of a mans mouth it was broken. Mad, the deceased kind, not the one related to wrath. But wrath was coming, too. "Nae?" There were so many syllables in his beloved sister's name. He stroked her face and felt the apparition of shame in his marrow. Like a place-memory. Like a haunting, but without cause. This creature here was his blood, but that was all she was. To let her be what she wanted, he'd have to abandon her, a little.<br/><br/>"You can't borrow her face." he said, but it was disbelieving, not an order. Maybe it was even a challenge for her. First he tried her lips with the tip of his thumb. No nymph there. He stretched that sister's mouth further, pressing it against her teeth as though she was visiting for love and he'd grown tired. Like she was a misguided whore and he was a well-informed bastard. "This." he said and looked at it. A precious pair of petals, the human kind, the kind he'd seen grow. They'd been unbearable during puberty.<br/><br/>He kissed her like there was sap on the vault of her mouth, before her swallow. It wasn't the kind of kiss that brothers should lay on their sisters. But it was the kind of closeness that was true but unconfessed behind one brother's rib cage. He wondered if Iris could synthesize or magic up Naella's real aromas, her saliva itself, from his blood. But he'd not told her to. She tasted like Greta. It made him sick and it made him lick her deeper. "You're not her." he said, tearing free.