He would take a thousand years of darkness if it meant they could stay like this.
He does not mind when their world is plunged into chaos, when the sun refuses to rise and there is word of monsters, things that no one can ever quite describe, haunted and hunting things. He does not mind because they are together, they sleep and wake together and she has had a hundred chances to leave and taken none of them.
Sometimes, he wakes and he looks at her and his chest is full enough to burst and he doesn’t have a name for what he feels. Happiness, yes, love, yes, but there is something else that comes over him when he settles beside her, his dark skin against her pale one.
It's a month or more before he realizes. Peace, he thinks, the word is peace.
They do no speak again of dying and he pretends to forget she once spoke of it wistfully. Peace is too fragile a thing.
When he first hears the noise, he isn’t fearful. They have heard any number of noises, strange things in the darkness, disembodied. As Agetta peers out, he doesn’t follow her gaze (his own orange eyes aren’t half so useful as her feline ones), instead he looks at her, searches her dim-lit face.
“I heard it,” he says, and as he speaks, it comes again – the noise shrill and horrible even at the distance. He cannot tell if it’s a cry of pain or of fury, but whatever the cause, he finds his skin prickling into gooseflesh, the first inkling of fear crawling into his chest.
Don’t, he thinks weakly, uselessly, don’t take this from us.
It’s quiet but his body is tight, waiting for that awful cry again. He knows they will hear it again. And will it be closer, next time?
“Agetta…” he says, not knowing what to say, but needing to say her name, the word comforting in his mouth, “should we…move somewhere safer?”
Not that he knows where that is. Is anywhere safe?
@[Agetta]