[ midnight's eyes, kaveh thinks, really are pink. they are pink in the way one might describe the exact ratio of pale chalk pigment mixed with the crushed shells of insects. you couldn't use that pink to describe a hazy fontainais dawn. that would be too benign. it's the sort of pink that came with promise of warning, a single band of it across a frog's back, the feather of a tail-spined bird. it was a pink that reminded you that it was humans who attributed weakness to it, that in nature, it had always been the colour that informed predators that there was blood in the water.

kaveh is thinking about that trail of blood as he studies the sharp-hooked edge of midnight's grin. the initial mortification is there, as is the impetus to step back. kaveh is only human. he is a man who bleeds when cut, who bruises when hurt, and who burns when put to the torch. nobody ought to look at the cast of midnight's dark lashes into the bleeding sea of his eyes and not understand the implications there.

but that's the thing, with kaveh. when you live in a perpetual state of fight or flight, your instincts eventually get used to the process of it. and only those who don't know kaveh well will assume that he tends towards flight. midnight grins, and kaveh looks, and kaveh thinks- ]

So why is it that your flirtations became overt when I began asking about your living standards? Should I call this a deflection pattern recognition instead? [ kaveh makes a face. as if to forestall the argument, he lifts his finger. it ghosts itself over the line of midnight's lips like the infinite approach of a sweeping asymptote
] We can at least wait until we've gotten the chandelier down before one of us has to call someone's bluff or another and this ends up all over the floor. Are we at least in agreement for this?