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axieta · 2 years

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Hungry eyes

Henry Winter x reader |

Warnings: in this part there are non but later parts are going to hit diff so mdi

Summary: Richard is the newest member of the bizarre, isolated classics course. There is seven of them in total, every personage strange and intriguing in their own way. But there is this one girl who’s sheer presence unnerves and simultaneously compels his whole being. What secrets do those sharp eyes of her hide? And what is her relation to the ever stoic Henry Winter?

Chapter 1

| In the eye of a predator |

I think I noticed it first during my second week in the Greek class. We were sitting, all seven of us, in the school library; all but Henry whining and breaking our heads over a particularly dreadful translation of Arrian. Something about Alexander, I’m sure of it.

It was then she looked at me for the first time. And it wasn’t just a throw-away glance, or a squint-eyed half-smile. No, it was the truest, fullest and most precise stare of all the stares I have ever witnessed in my life.

She tasked me with her gaze, her eyes slightly hooded, with long, thick eyelashes. From head to toe and then from toe to head. Said eyelashes fluttered, when she came to scan my face and then her eyes met mine. And I saw it, hidden deep inside of those abyssal irises, the electrifying glint that sent shivers down my spine. The moment our gazes crossed, I knew I was done for. I was vanquished in the matter of seconds, quickly submitted into the reign of that cool look, enslaved by its ferociousness, the sheer intensity of it; and I didn’t even know that I was competing. Something in that stare compelled me to give in.

It was a spark of folly, pure and hot like a furnace in the middle of December and for a second I thought it to be burning deep into my cheek.

I remember Hampden in a magnificent blur. A splash of red, gold, white and green. To me it is a mystic collage of places, objects without a name or an owner. It is an onslaught of faces, Greek letters and Latin phrases blending intangible into each other.

But there is something in particular that constantly managers to break through the heavy mist of stimuli and fogged-up memories. It burns and freezes me up every time it reappears deep in my mind and I can’t seem to get rid of it.

The shining, primal and dangerous pair of eyes. Looking from underneath furrowed brows, right through my physical shell. Etching the uneasy, thrilled feeling of the consciousness right into my bones. They haunt me up to this day. And they shine beautifully amidst the conflagration their stare fires up inside of me.

It was far too hot, for a lad as uptight and uneasy as I constantly was at that time. I remember starting to sweat profusely the minute that stare anchored into my figure. With time I learned to ignore the uncomfortable feeling, to push it down and bottle it up like the rest of things in my life.

But that first time, the initial first-degree contact with that stare had sent me into a hellish spiral of sweat and as I thought a feverish seizure.

Looking back, I was probably exaggerating, it was however extremely unnerving to feel those vibrant, lively irises bearing right into my flesh as if they could dig up my deepest, most shameful secrets.

She was, the proprietary of the eyes I mean, one of the latest additions to the class, however junior to me in age, she’s been a semester ahead of me in context of education in Hampden’s Greek and Latin course. Outside of the school walls, she was eons ahead of me.

I think there wasn’t a subject she wasn’t interested in. Like an encyclopedia, you could start any topic, most random or niche, and she would already have had formed an opinion on it and delight you with a lengthy explanation to her stance. She wasn’t like Henry, who had clearly dedicated himself solely to the classical arts, and passionately ignored anything other than that, or Bunny who in turn ignored everything that wasn’t forced into him or served to him on a silver platter.

No, she was a titan of knowledge. Hungry for more and eager to bathe you in some of the goods she had already acquired.

But she wasn’t loud in that strive for knowledge of hers. She would rather engage in one-on-one conversations, get to know her interlocutor, synchronize with him and conduct a debate that would also engage, and with luck, completely devour him as well.

Although her favorite subject were the many a conquests of Alexander the Great. Yes, it was an endless topic for her.

Once even I saw her shed a tear while comparing Alexander and Hephaestion to Achilles and Patroclus, wailing over the poetic tragedy of the Macedonians’ situation in light of Alexander’s love for the Iliad.

‘He even had his oven copy of the damn book. He slept with it under his pillow!’

I remember her voice breaking every time someone prompted her to start this particular topic. And I remember Bunny rolling his eyes every time she undertook it.

Maybe that’s why I recall that particular evening so clearly. We were translating The campaigns of Alexander after all; but instead of her usual glossy eyes and melancholic stare I was faced with that.

The malignant gaze of a demon.

Well, now I might be exaggerating a little. But it is true. There was something hot and unnerving about her. Maybe it was the stare. Or maybe it was something much more clandestine, like the sharp angles of her face, the way her eyebrows set or her mouth shaped her syllables. Maybe it was the distinct play of light and shadows on her face, or was it the bird-like tilt of her head. Or the fluid, swift movements of her body. As if she was pure water, nothing more nothing less, flowing gracefully from one place to the other. Never faltering, never tripping over or halting.

Or maybe the fact that sometimes, when she looked up at you, with that bird tilt to her head and a deep cut smile to her face, one that would reveal a dimple on the left side of her face, and a slight tightness at the corners of her eyes, she looked almost sweet. Alluring in a mischievous way, the way all things primal can be. Polarizing and pulling you in like a magnet. Like a fox, looking you straight in the eye as he bites through the arteries of a wild goose he just caught. It is a tragic, gruesome scene, but something in the cruelty of the deed makes you unable to look away. And maybe it is the blood dripping down the fiery red fur, or the last high pitched quacks of the goose, but there is something forbidden and for it enticing in the scene.

I could never realy put a finger on it. What was the true source of that mystic, almost electric aura she seemed to be oozing out of ever pore of her body.

My bet would be on the totality of those little quirks I’ve already mentioned.

There was something profoundly primeval about her. She would mask it of course, but I’ve seen it on several occasions. The animal ripping from within her. Hiding in her wolfish grin, lurking in the glint of her eyes.

It made my hair stand on my head.

She was a perfect predator. Disguised into a frail, sweet girl. With big, seductive eyes, soft lips, and the sweetest nose. Her voice deep, melodic like streams of old Greece and her laugh all rumbling summer thunder. She seemed just so… so good, so poetic, so beautiful.

It was that crude cunning that made my stomach churn. Burrowed deep under her skin just waiting to jump out of her.

If I had to pick someone, out of us seven, who most resembled a Greek god or goddess I would choose her. And not because of her skills in greek or Latin. No, Henry surpassed her as well as the rest of us in that department. It also wasn’t for her beauty. In my eyes, no one could compare to Camilla.

No, that would be for the feral fierceness that constantly boiled over in her. Her restlessness, the passion that oh so often consumed her and the emotions upholstered with velvet of indulgence I would later see her throw herself into with abandon. She looked like she belonged right in the middle of Dionysus’ cortège. At times she was senile and pleasant to the mortals that wished to mingle with the lesser gods such as the classical course class. But she also looked like the type of girl to identify herself not with the quick-feeted nymphs or graceful dreads that formed the procession, but rather the wild and menacing maenads. She made me feel as if only she’d drunk too much of vine she would gladly and eagerly rip my head off clean of my shoulders, and she would later laugh about it, as my corpus-less head would be forced to sing to her à la poor Orpheus.

And I knew I saw the shine of her teeth not because I was a good observer, or because she had grown careless and didn’t bother masking around me. No, I saw it because she wanted me to see it. Because she wanted to mess with me, mischievousness running deep in her veins, chaos being the only thing for witch she could feel real passion. Because she was sure, no one was going to believe me. The truest of predators, as I said.

And it was true. Back then, even if I told myself from a week before, he wouldn’t believe me. After all, she looked fine. She wasn’t a great beauty like Camilla, but she was rather easy on the eye. Maybe it is because of that true, cruel nature of hers that she was so kind to reveal before me, that her imagine remains rather distorted in my head; but I can tell you one thing- what she lacked in beauty, she made up in charm and charisma. Even without the glint in her eyes an indescribable aura of mystery veiled her existence. And when she started talking, and I mean talking with you and not to you, her deep, melodic voice could put you in some kind of a trans, like the ones conducted in Delphi. I think she gave people courage to speak with that voice; somehow untangled their tongues and compelled them to converse far more easily than if they would without her.

She had this weird soothing quality about her, if only she wanted to seem soothing that is.

Once I saw her enraptured in some sort of a quarry with Simon Sharon, a scrawny boy with a stutter, who at the time of the exchange did not stutter at all. On the contrary, he seemed to be standing his rhetoric ground against the onslaught of her own arguments quite gracefully.

She was like a magnet for guys. And while Camilla seemed to be almost boy-repellant, the opposite gender swarmed to her peer like flies to honey. Not only that, girls would also cling to her as if she was their guru or something.

I always thought it was weird. After all, she did nothing so special. Nothing that would attract this much attention, and as I’ve seen later in the year, she would go as far as to actively rid herself of the following.

And yet, up to the very end she remained our school’s sweetheart.

She dressed rather modestly. Mostly in long dresses, sometimes skirts and cardigans, although ocasionally we would also see her sporting a pair of pants. During those days Bunny seemed to be most cold towards her.

Either way, most of her clothes were kind of airy, ghostly even. Sometimes when she would walk through the corridors and a gust of wind gathered the ruffles of her dress she resembled more an apparition rather than a human being.

She was rather palie, and so the whole atmosphere of Hampden as well at the fraily clothing played into the elusive nature of her beauty and further thickened the cocoon of mystery around her.

Her eyes were intelligent, big and bright when she needed them to be, and narrow and nigh all-sing when she didn’t. Her face went in and out of those two states so easily, as if she didn’t even think of it. The transitions between her moods were so natural that sometimes, after some time even I couldn’t really point out when or even if the change occurred.

It was like having a shapeshifter living right next door to you, and noone conscious of that but you.

Henry, Francis, Bunny, Camilla and Charles, they all were too blind or too focused on themselves to discern this duality, although I think out of all of them, Henry came the closest to the truth.

Out of all of us, he was the one that she tolerated the most. Sometimes I would see the both of them sitting together in the library. Most of the times they would be silent. He would be translating something, and she would be scribbling away or reading. But a few times I was able to witness a heated debate between the two of them, upheld both in perfect Greek and later on in Latin as well.

I thought Henry kind of liked her, in his own way. I thought he tolerated her, and vice versa simply because of the obvious equality between them.

Only later I found out how stupid and oblivious to the true nature of this relation I was. And that the signs were all around me. And that I was just too dense to not pick up on them.

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