[private] standing by the river watching my bridge burn down; jenger pony

[Levi]

But he is years older than he looks, blessed with immortality and old enough to have seen monsters who smiled and demons who stretched out a helping hand. He has walked aimlessly for too many thousands of miles alone to shun any woman with a gentle smile, no matter her other features.

But it is good she does not press him on this, not at first, for he did not fully understand it. He only knew that the softness of her stance and the gentle caress of her voice made him want her near. She soothed something in him that roiled and burned too hot, and made him forget the way the darkness crept in all around him.

His question spooks her, and for a moment he fears she is leaving. She fights a quiet battle, and he watches it play out across the fire-lit angles of her ghostly face. But then her eyes lift to his, and the concern he forgot to hide is gone.

Her answer is evasive, but there is enough truth in it to satisfy him. Ghosts are hiding between the lines of her story, he doesn't miss that, but he doesn't feel the need or right to press for more. The things left unsaid are enough to make him curious: enough to comfort him that she will not balk if he were to suggest the ghosts in his own story. There are threads of their lives that sound alike, and he smiles with her as she mentions the wolf pups. His own pups probably had struck off on their own by now, but their mother - he wasn't so sure she would have ever left.

"Do you know a girl, painted and blue, named Rapture?"  Another woman who had made him wonder why he ever wanted to be alone, who had spoken soft words across his skin until he knew he would die for her. But fate never called him to such drastic action, and he had failed at much lesser tasks. 

He too had been happier than he deserved to be, and he had turned it to ash.

Shadows of thoughts like this complicate the formerly content expression on his face, the flames that dance along his body flaring angrily before he draws a deep breath into his lungs. But her final question draws him from the shadows he is falling into, and he returns his tired eyes to her face.

"Levi," he replies, trying to hide the way he is suddenly feeling. "Once Heir, once soldier. Once hunted and five times a father - but not a very good one."

Levi

so scream you, out from behind the bitter ache.