08-30-2018, 12:43 AM
Vulgaris
With her pressed tight to him, all his skeletons peek from his closet and every vile secret threatens to bubble up from the singularity of his heart. He wants to give her everything – the best parts of him, all the bloodied sins, and every nightmare that wakes him in the middle of the night. God, he’s so full of secrets that letting them out might make him disappear altogether, leaving nothing but his skin and teeth for her to love. This identity he’s built for himself is all that’s held him up long enough to meet her, anyway. How quickly would she run away if she knew the deepest shadows of his soul? (Or would she try to drink it all in and let it drown her like some modern Ophelia?)
He sighs. She has known pain and heartbreak but in different ways than he has. Loneliness has driven him mad, left him pining for Shiya when she should have been a monsoon to the candle flame of his desire. It disgusts him to remember but it lingers there like a blister almost ready to burst. Maybe it’s why he slipped so easily into her palm and stayed there for a while. Such a pleasure to burn with want beneath her touch.
And still, he wants to let her in, wants to show her the gallery of his evil before he could ever allow her to care for him. How could she kiss his scars away without knowing how they came to be? How could the bird love the serpent who eats her?
But the words are already there and he can’t take them back any more than he could sever himself from her now. He touches his lips to the place where her mane ends and her spine is just beneath the skin. A single bite here and she’d die within minutes. (Ghosts of his past, all twitching and bright red while their bodies give up hope, come to mind.) But he remains gentle and kind. He’s never harmed a girl once he’s slept with her. Their bodies become some kind of sacred once they’ve been offered up to him and he could never tarnish them, especially not this one. She’s the gilded altar of his heart, the Hail Mary of his hope.
If she gave the command, he’d find his other lovers and crush their windpipes just to see her smile.
A shiver trails its fingers along his spine as he rests his chin across her. Surrender has never felt so sweet, he thinks. Her words are a lullaby when they reach him and he smiles so peacefully at the sound of her voice. But her question is also a nail that crucifies him, nails him to the wall so love can finally have its way with the serpent. He’s been running so long that he thought it might never get the chance to sink its claws into him. Such a foolish monster, he is.
“I don’t deserve someone like you, Leliana. I think you should know that before we go on like this,” he says quietly. Part of him doesn’t want her to hear but the earliest hours of the morning are silent aside from their breathing. “I’ve hurt a lot of people. I’m gonna keep hurting them too. I don’t know how else to be.”
It’s the honest truth of the matter, really. Unless he’s curled into the safety of her warmth every hour of every day, then there is no joy when he isn’t breaking someone’s smile. All the anger he’s tried so hard to lock into the cellar of his soul just comes boiling up. Next thing he knows, he’s consuming any purity he finds in the world like it’ll baptize him from the inside out.
“I can only promise you that I’ll never let anything hurt you – not me or anyone else. I’ll rip the gods from the skies before I let that happen.”
Maybe she can feel how tense he is now. Maybe she’ll ask him what he means, and he’ll have to crawl away from her light. Regardless, it’s too late now and he has to live with what he’s done.