To glory in self like a new monster - any.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

He is finding her unwieldy.
It is frustrating that he cannot grab on to her for long enough to wrap his fingers around her and seal the deal. He oh-so badly wants to – instead, he can only seem to trace the angles and finger the curves where fat and muscle hide the bones best. He is stifled by something. By her own queer alignment with the night sky and by something far more odious. She disarms him, just enough to save her own hide and to unravel him piecemeal. White-knuckled and desperate, he scabs himself on her diamond exoskeleton, trying to peel back those studs of starstuff to get to the soft place beneath.

(Frothing and wild-eyed, that soft, pale-skinned thing (that strange, fleshy boy-thing) rings against his ribs, rattling them like prison bars; his strange hands (dexterous and five-fingered) reaching between them, towards her beautiful teal and brown, searching for something like him in her… He recognizes the northern scent – ice winds and nutmeg.)

He runs his eyes down the smooth places of teal horseflesh, and the crown of glitter and dim nightlight she wears… and he would not deny that it is beautiful, though he can imagine it rearranged and made better still. He smiles, watching her skin jerk – it is the way they curl, in and back and around on themselves, that is his favourite part. 
So if she is keen to subdue him, he is not defenseless. He has years of hate and rejection to feast on. They are colliding forces – coming together with a crack, like rams slamming headgear. They can stand together, entwined eternal like a new constellation, and figure out what motivates best: beauty and love, or fear and loneliness.

He cannot hear her rushing pulse, or see it beneath the armoured coat, but he knows it all too well.
He does not need to see or hear it to know it is there.
He watches her silvery eyes for the bluster of anxiety in them, but her twists of creepers force him to look away and lean his head back. He watches them curl and lick the air protectively, examining the celestial glint in the sharp barbs, and when they pass around him, he cannot evade their rocklike touch. They brush against his chest and he tolerates their touch for a moment. 
And then a moment too long, and he recoils slightly, “Beautiful defense mechanisms,” he murmurs, and they snap away from him and his vulnerable flesh.

He hears her airy question, and the intimate way it purrs from her lips with his name in tow, in a distant kind of way. (Though he shivers – it reminds him a bit of Phina and unsettles his gut with something else.) He is staring at the space around her (where her starry vines had been, where her mimicry of his horns glitter and give of eerie light that reminds him too much of sadness), his greyish lip curls, and he turns back to her. His voice is thin and gravelled, anger biting against raw wonderment, “how do you crack?” 

He can do it.
He can do it, if he finds the flaw.


Pollock,
The gift-giver.