"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
How dangerous the boredom.
Because it is more than boredom.
It is vicious restlessness.
It is irritation that tightens like a vise around her throat.
It quivers in the muscles and it gnashes her teeth and it rolls her wild eyes. So that she is lunging into the darkness, catching rabbits by the throat, watching them fight for their lives before she disposes of them. She licks their blood from her lips, holds it on her tongue in worship, and then she becomes bored of this, too.
Because she is a predator but there is so little by way of prey here in Pangea. And she has exhausted the forest and the river and the meadow, too. And she has no desire to find Ghaul, only to have the stench of nameless, faceless women inject all that anger into her again.
So, she loiters. She languishes in the sun, lets its heat warm the cold, cold heart. She grits her teeth and cuts her tongue on her teeth, lets the venom turn her numb. She does not think about all that has led her here. She does not think of the mother she left or the father she still fantasizes about sinking her teeth into. She does not think of the brother she’d caught wind of. She thinks only of the heat and the crippling boredom.
And when movement catches her eye, she lifts her head and glances in that direction. A shudder steals down the length of her spine, because a predator is always thrilled by prey.
But this is not prey at all. No, this is something else entirely.
Draco delights in the suffering of what others cannot have. When he watches a filly try her hardest to reach a bright winter berry, he does not rush to her aid; instead, he observes her struggle with plain eyes and a flat mouth. When the girl gives up, Draco waits until she is just within sight to see him reach up and wrap his lips around the berry.
Her disappointment is a depressant but the demon lives on that shit.
It isn’t exactly viciousness that drives him to be the terrible creature he is, though that might play a part in some small amount.
It’s an emptiness, a black hole that lives in his stomach and keeps him from ever feeling full. That is what drives him to eat the berries and to devour a child’s disappointment and to walk away with nothing more than a casual swish of his tail.
And even then—even then he is still hungry.
Gospel is a gift, a kiss full of clashing bones and sharp teeth. Draco finds her as delightful as the swallowing of a child’s ruined day—the violence she carries on her back as beautiful to him as a sunset to one that just found their vision.
Hunger and appreciation tool and wrestle in his gut. He is not sure if he wants to steal her energy or bask in it; so, he settles on a simple—
He comes armed with a question she cannot answer.
Not really.
Because a name is just that – a name – and what a useless, fickle thing it is. She is Gospel, certainly, but she is more than that, too. She is all the venom that pollutes her murky bloodstream, begging for a new network of veins to lay to waste. She is the way the late afternoon sun glints soft off the scales, diffused because she is a thing that takes and so very seldom ever gives anything in return.
She is a hatred so severe that sometimes it makes her temples throb. And there is something alive in her that she does not quite know how to tame.
And here, in this moment, she is a spitting want to draw him closer. Because he is beautiful, too. And she can tell just by looking at him that there is some great, pulsing darkness in him. How she feasts on these things! How she delights in their darkness.
So, when he does not come closer, she adopts a sweet simper and sidles closer herself. She is not an innocent thing, Gospel. No, not this girl who sank her teeth into her father’s hide the moment she knew they were lethal. No, not this girl who gasped in frantic ecstasy as someone wrapped death around her throat and pulled it tight. But she smiles like one.
“Don’t you know?” she asks and the voice… oh, the voice, dripping with the same kind of warmth that coils neat in the gut when death comes calling. Such honeyed, dangerous comfort. “Haven’t you been looking for me?”
But she is not built for being coy. So, the smile fades and she tips back her head and says, “my name is Gospel.”
You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, Litotes used to say to Draco. When he was younger, he used to find it funny and wise; but now? Now he grins because he knows what his father meant. He knows that, while overused, it is an adage to keep tucked tightly to the family of shadows’ heart because they know they are bullshitters the most when they are faced with one.
Gospel, for all of her might and fury, bullshits Draco in that first second. Her coy drawl might mask her serpentine nature to most, but the demon knows too much of hiding one’s raw nature. He does not grow angry or uncomfortable, though; in fact, he loves her all the more for it.
There is a certain innocence to Draco in that he does not know what it feels like to choke on lust and need; so when the desire rises from the pit of his stomach and burns his throat, he expels it with a simple, “I’ve found you.” Yes, he has found her, this match to the bitter venom Draco carries in his veins.
Gospel, she says; and Draco thinks she is like the singing of hymns to the Dark God. He thinks if Carnage had a temple, he would delight in Gospel being its mistress. But the fading of her smile tells him she will never settle for being a man’s—even a god of man’s—mistress.
“It’s a pleasure, Gospel. My name is Draco.” His voice is a low murmur, and though he uses his typical charming vocabulary, his delivery is far more dark. “Tell me, Gospel,” Draco adds as he leans in close to her proud head, “do you like violence?” He tilts his head now, eyeing the chestnut locks of her mane and vulnerable curve of her neck.
Are they all born from the stars, she wonders.
They are all so desperately beautiful with galaxies on their skin.
And that impenetrable darkness at the centers of them.
And she, so ordinary by comparison. But there is beauty, too, in her vicious appetite for destruction. Her crippling taste for blood. She is not beautiful at first glance, no, because she has been kissed by neither stars nor cold nor any obvious strangeness (save for the scales, which are certainly not as exceptional as she wishes they were). But he sees it in her, she can tell it in the way he looks at her.
And oh! How it thrills her to know that she can capture their interest, that she can have them asking her name as if it is something worth knowing. There is power in this, she knows. More power in this, she supposes, than in being beautiful.
I’ve found you, he says and it chases a tremor down the ladder of her spine. And back up again, too. It injects a specific, nameless heat into the very center of her until she shivers with it. The horns remind her of Ghaul, the stars remind her of Stave, but they are very much his own. Draco, he says and she rolls it sweetly across the surface of her tongue and then swallows it. Draco. She imagines what his blood must taste like, wonders if she would find it bitter were she to spill it down her throat.
She licks her teeth.
How she delights in the way he rakes his gaze along the vulnerable plain of her throat. She tips back her head. Just enough. An almost imperceptible invitation. Take me, it says. Spill what you will and leave the rest. But she does not speak, not right away. Instead, she peers at him through a mess of sooty lashes and then grins, slow, the lips pulling back to reveal a flash of fang.
“Oh, Draco,” she coos sweetly, “why don’t you find out?”
It is a thirst for death that drives him to bite his own tongue until it bleeds. The lightest drip of blood paints his lips red. She tilts her neck to him and Draco’s stomach ties itself in a million knots. That throat speaks of more violence than the demon has ever known.
The blood that pulses in her jugular is intoxicating. Draco wonders how red it must run.
So intoxicated is he that he forgets entirely that he can dive into Gospel’s mind. It’s only when her slow, vicious grin injects adrenaline through his veins that he hears what she is thinking. He hears it so loudly and vibrantly, like crimson red sentences spelled out right before his eyes. I want those fangs, he thinks, and he is affirmed by how she wants to use them.
The pair spin around each other, planets without a sun desperate to find their orbit.
Draco draws closer, just close enough to hover his mouth over where her blood rushes in her neck. His head grows foggy with her scent and the way he can imagine how her skin will feel between his teeth. The scales on Gospel’s neck taste like salt and desire when he finally does wrap his mouth around her skin. For a moment, he is confused, wondering how in a few moments he got here, lipping at a stranger’s skin.
But it is that kindred spirit, he knows, the one his father used to speak of. How when equal vices and virtues find each other, they collide and writhe and sizzle with friction. Draco simply melts into that lesson, into the way Gospel is so quick to invite him in.
“Bite me,” Draco demands, because he is so desperate to feel the violence he inflicts on others. Because her fangs are the only weapons he has wanted inflicted on himself.
He does not plunge razors into her flesh.
The teeth he skims across the surface of those scales are ordinary, dull.
But it still thrills her to know that he could rip the throat out of her, should he choose to.
Because the darkness has other weapons, she knows. Because there is more to violence than fangs and drawn blood. She had felt death wrapped around her throat, had felt it choke the air out of her lungs, and he’d never touched her at all.
She trusts him, Draco, to destroy her, though he does little more than skim his teeth across her skin.
His demand echoes loud in each hemisphere of her brain. It sinks into the meat of her chest. And she imagines Ghaul, how he had resented the demands she made of him. She thinks of Stave and how he, too, had rejected her. She imagines the power in it. She could deny him. She could grit her teeth and make him pry open her mouth.
But she is young still, Gospel. She is young and impulsive and she wraps herself around him. She reaches for him, sinks her fanged teeth into the meat of his shoulder. And oh, the ecstasy that spirals heady through the network of her veins! Oh, how she quivers with her want to let flow the venom that courses through her! But alas, she finds some semblance of self-control. She lets loose just enough to numb the flesh there in the immediate area and then pulls her mouth away, licks his blood from her tongue.
She drags in a staggered breath, exhales some guttural thing that speaks of a dark pleasure she has caught only brief glimpses of in her short life. She shudders with it and then grins her bloody grin.
“You taste,” she murmurs, throaty, sultry, her eyes half-closed as she studies him, “just as good as you look.”
Draco gasps when she bites him. It’s a low, masculine exhale—almost more of a growl than a breath. His eyes roll back in his head and he cannot help but imagine how good his blood must taste. Gospel spills it so easily, so naturally. The demon thinks it must look so beautiful and vibrant upon her tongue.
Draco gathers her mane in his mouth and tugs as she removes her teeth. His skin goes numb. He begins to back away as she speaks, trailing his mouth along the vein in her neck, feeling her pulse healthy and quick. He finds where her cheek meets her neck and feeling tired from the excitement of every gift Gospel gave him, he only leaves a warm kiss. He is sure this will not sate whatever Gospel desires, but he finds a warm pleasure in knowing that he may leave her wanting.
And he wonders what might happen if she forces it out of him, or how they might collide in the future.
Draco trails his mouth over the curve of Gospel’s cheek to find the corner of her mouth. His blood smears against the side of his lips. The thrill of tasting the violence that streams through his veins sends his heart back into a race.
“What do you desire, Gospel?” he whispers, then draws back to catch her gaze. “I never want you to leave my side.”
How sweet the sound she coaxes out of him.
And isn’t it just electric?
Couldn’t she just sink her teeth into the sound he makes?
Certainly she could spend the rest of her life feasting on it.
Certainly it could sustain her for the remainder of her days.
She grins her bloody grin and licks her bloody lips. Together, they shudder with it. They are young, the pair of them, but old enough to know the heaven in their touch. The staggering beauty in the pain they inflict on one another.
He draws away from her and she hisses – her own low, mournful sound – reflexively. Because she wants him to stay close, wants to siphon the warmth from his flesh, wants him to catch her scaled skin between his teeth and rip it clean from the bone. She wants him to destroy her. So fiercely that it makes her ache. So fiercely that it arrests the air in her chest.
He draws away but he does not steal his mouth from her. He goes on touching her and she delights in this, too. She delights in the way he touches her mouth and comes away bloody. His own blood. “How does it taste?” she asks, shifting her focus from his mouth to his eyes.
And then he levels her with his own question. The answer is simple, isn’t it? Destruction. Power. Worship. Are these not the things that all women desire? She blinks slow, still dizzy with the taste of his blood as it pools sweetly beneath her tongue. The grin fades slow and she reaches out to skim her mouth across the surface of the shoulder into which she’d sunk her teeth.
Gospel asks what he will do. Draco levels her with a cool gaze and contemplative smile. He rolls that gaze from her eyes, up to her ears, and down the spine that shivers for him. What am I willing to do? he wonders as he studies every arch of her muscles. Draco is no knight in shining armor—he knows nothing of true chivalry or love, and he does not lie to himself in thinking this is romance.
Or, perhaps it is romance, the kind that destroys everything in its path.
The feeling of Gospel’s mouth on his skin reminds Draco of who he is and what he is capable of. Anger, violence, suffering, conquering. He takes a jaded bite out of life and gives nothing in return. But for her? For the first being that matches his need to be burned to ash? Why, he thinks he can do just about anything—and will not offer it.
“I will give you the blood you desire. The irreplaceable laughter of mocking death. I know you, Gospel. I can give you that.” Draco trains his eyes back on her’s, feeling nothing and everything all at once. The emptiness he is so accustomed to does not fade, but devouring Gospel almost gives him a sense of fulfillment.
