Chapter Text
"Opia: the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable."
Winning a staring contest with them would be impossible, is Quirrel’s first thought upon meeting the little wanderer’s gaze.
He wonders if he should lean down or kneel to be at their height, but then again, he doesn’t know how they would take it. Some bugs find it condescending. Others find it kind. He can’t read much from their expression, what little they have of one, and so he opts for a polite in-between of glancing down at them and trying not to look too intimidating for being taller.
They don’t seem to care, either way. He doesn’t know why it bothers him that they don’t; surely there must be something?
But he searches their gaze and finds little. (Some long forgotten part of himself twinges in painful sympathy; an old, hidden memory resurfacing. The blank, uncomprehending masks of broken vessels, a monstrous price for–) It’s almost painful, in a strange way. What he finds there is something he doesn’t quite understand yet.
He talks to them for a little while, about himself. About his wanderlust, a drive to see something new; something ancient and long-ruined.
They take their leave before he does, leaving the temple without a word, and he finally puts a name to the only thing he had seen in their eyes;
exhaustion.
Even here, a seeming newcomer to this place and ruin, they had come a long, long way. And even if they weren’t aware of it, some part of them was tired beyond belief.
He decides that maybe, if he crosses paths with them again, he’ll talk to them of pleasant things, and perhaps that look may change.
He hopes, anyway.