come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
It is her name on his lips and that smile on his mouth. It is the constant of his gravity and the way she is always pulled back into him, always tethered no matter how many of those cords she pretends to cut. It is the way that there is only him for her, the way he is the only one strong enough to withstand the tempest of a heart breaking in perpetuity - the way he wants to stay, and even though she tries to understand it, she cannot. Because it is also the way she did not choose him back.
She saw his heart, hidden as it was, and she turned elsewhere. Turned to someone who left scars on her neck and even deeper ones in her heart, who left bruises in eyes that drowned beneath the oceans of so much pain.
She chose wrong, chose so wrong that the choice stripped her cleanly of everything she used to be. Took her love and her laughter and that starlight in her eyes, and buried it in a grave inside her own broken chest.
Still, somehow he is here. He is closing the distance between them like it is nothing, reaching out to warm the curve of her mottled blue neck with the heat of his breath, and she cannot break free of the knowledge that she does not deserve this. That she is wretched, and yet that is still enough for him. There is pain in her face when she moves to close those last inches of distance between them, when she slips beneath his neck like an echo of past familiarity and leans into the curve of his dark chest like she might be able to live there beside the steady rhythm of his heart.
“I have always loved that you call me that.” Her words are something quiet, almost stoic except for the way her mouth finds his skin and leaves kisses like constellations across the dark expanse of his throat. She has always been so good at taking. “I liked that it was mine and I would never have to share it with anyone else.” Even when he had to watch her turn to someone else.
It is either pain or bile that rises in her throat, disgust at herself and their past, at the way she still keeps him trapped in her gravity. But it is different now, changed by the way her heart is tethered to him, and she does not know if that makes this better or worse.
“I do.” She says, and the words she presses to his skin are softer than any of the light shed from the flickering of her stars floating around them. “I want it so badly it feels like I can’t even breathe.” A secret she would only ever share with him. “I am terrified you will reach into my heart and pry it apart by all the cracks.” She is whispering now, cheek pressed to his neck because nothing will ever be close enough, nothing will ever be right again. “But I don’t want to leave the only place that feels like home.” She traces her lips over the curve of his chest, presses a kiss over the beating of his heart. “I have never deserved you, Fenris.”
But I love you.
even though i try not to
