[private] I craved to get back that feeling I’d known; luster

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

She is onyx and flint now. Something steely and cold where once there had been softness and pain. It startles him more than the abrupt finding of her. Knits his brows together and pushes his own shields up. The rebellious glint in his eyes, the hardened palms and apathetic air of someone who was used to living on his own—who was used to finding the road empty and vast. It’s an easy defense to fall behind.

“Who is to say I am drawn to either?” he says with something like a drawl, although he knows enough to know he could not hide behind such a flimsy lie. His desire had never been a hidden thing. His attraction never well hid beneath the storm clouds of his eyes. He had told her, once, that he was a terrible friend, and he has done nothing but live up to it. He had never stuck around, even when she had needed him.

He had returned to the vagabond lifestyle.

Returned to his rootless existence.

But he stays now, the odd kindness only she capable of drawing out finding its way to the surface of him. “Who’s to say I am not drawn to both?” The question softens his hardened features just a little, lights a light in his simple brown eyes as he shakes the cream of his mane out, letting it fall heavy down the sides of his neck. He shrugs, elegant and quick. “I don’t think it matters much. They are one and the same.”

He could no longer separate the light from her dark than himself.

He listens though, trying to discern the meaning behind her words. Trying to understand what has made her so sharp-edged now. There is a piece of him that whispers that he should leave. That he should let her go her separate way, but he has always been helpless before her—and this new version is no different than the hesitant, wounded girl he had met so many years before. “I think of you as I always have.”

A laugh—a mistake, perhaps—as one corner of his mouth lifts into a roguish smile.

“Although perhaps you would be the one to leave my neck gouged this time.”

It would be worth it, he thinks.

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known