lion & the lamb. | sunny [&malachi]

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His movements were startling. Sunny leaned back as he stepped from his hologram, sudden with surprise. They hadn't told her that the holograms could move, and when she caught her breath she saw sunlight meet his smile - as if he could feel the warmth from the sun. As if he was made of it.

"You were brave, lion boy. You were brave."

Sunny thought to ask if he could feel anything, but the question got caught between her twisted up tongue. She'd asked him for an answer she had memorised since childhood, one she'd turned into her own weapon. But it was her father in her that scoffed at the word brave, huffing in response.

The more she looked at him - at the hologram - the more she noticed the differences from Julian. The way he walked, for one. With grace, with softness. The way he spoke, so old-timey. So educated. Like Aria - but without the pomp and arrogance. More like her grandfather, long gone like Malachi.

Lost to the sun.

“You belong to the sun” Malachi finished, still contempt and peaceful. Nothing seemed to disturb him, not even death. False rebirth. Sunny envied him for a moment. All she knew was anger and emotion, all around her. All within her. Perhaps the Le Rouxes were once a peaceful people. Perhaps her father, and his father, had gotten it all wrong.

"Why do you see me as a coward?" and he chuckled then, as if the word couldn't possibly apply to him. "A martyr's fate is always death. I was not afraid of it."

Air sucked through her teeth, Sunny blinked as the statement hit her heart. Unfurling her arms, then returning them in defense in a matter of seconds, she glanced angrily at the ground and shifted her balance to her hips. The girl had not come to sympathise with Malachi, a figure she'd learned to dismiss as nothing but a disappointment lost to the pages of history books. But it nagged at her, that line. Even as he stared into the light, dust particles dancing in-between the space between them and floating through his faux atoms, he remained calm.

Sunny stepped into the space where the sunshine hit the floor. Death, she was not afraid of it either. But of Malachi's truth, and how it felt realising he might perhaps understood her better than any other Le Roux had - that frightened her.

Scoffing, nails dug into freckled arms burnt by the summer, Sunny gnawed on her lips. "Dad said you were a coward for not fighting. But,"

But. There was always a what if, an unless, an exception to the rule with this family. Sunny didn't want to be it. Didn't want to admit she already was, the only Le Roux without an invitation to the Keeper Ball - the only Le Roux that scolded in the sunshine, that fought not for her surname but for herself.

The only one who doubted herself, her name.

"You think it's braver to not fight at all?"

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