03-09-2016, 11:51 AM
He is a beacon for predators, across his skin is writ every weakness. The delicacy of his bones beg for breaking; the paper-thinness of his skin, for tearing. He is not unaware of these stares, their gazes resting on him like a tangible pressure.
He’d even loved such a predator, once: a wolf-girl with bones like steel beams, strong everywhere he was weak. They’d been a laughable pair, a lamb with a lion, and it has ended as one expects these things to: with broken bones and shattered skin, blood pooled and cooling under a heathen sky.
He had come back – somehow, he had come back – and he wonders sometimes if it was a dream but there are scars he cannot account for, like he was remade hastily, carelessly.
They are a reminder, as if he needed one: you are prey.
He feels the familiar weight of a predator’s gaze as he speaks to the first women, cranes his roaned head. She is easy enough to spot, and his eyes widen at the sight of the snake draped across her neck like it was meant to be there, as if she did not exist in defiance of nature, wearing such a terrible creature as if it were nothing more than jewelry. She’s tattooed, too, snakes and swords and for a moment he remembers the sky-blue streaks on the wolf-girl and his heart clenches.
She oozes a question and he tries to take his eyes from her, she is dark and dangerous and strange, this snake-woman.
“It wasn’t my choice,” he says, simply, and it speaks for so much – he had not chosen to die, nor had he chosen to return.
(Though loving someone who would damn you was perhaps a choice in its own right.)
And so, the prey eyes the predator, feeling the weight of her gaze as his own bones cry out in their fragility.
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark
happy to have you <33