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For a long time, always had been a precarious promise given to him.
Always for him was longer than it was for most; it was a gift both dangerous and delicate, beautiful in its own fragility. He had lived his life sheltering that forever, precarious around it, knowing that he had to shield it—knowing that he had to carry it in his chest and guard it from those who would steal it from him. Those, like her, who would rip it from his grasp and replace it with vulnerability. With death.
But now, curled around her, her mouth pressing to the slopes of his shoulder, his wings resting along her back and draping along her side, he realized that the vulnerability did not come from opening himself up to the possibility of her, but to the denial of her. Vulnerability came from trying to protect himself.
His heart beats quickly in his throat as he leans down to touch her again, to feel the silk of her mane beneath his velvet lips and the beginning of the feather she had stolen and wrapped into the tangles of herself. He lingered there for a second before he answered her, his voice slow and small. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t. He had nothing to offer her—nothing to give. Yet, here he was hoping she’d accept.
“I have something to tell you,” he began, clearing his throat and straightening, nerves crawling along the edges of his nerves. “Before…before, everything, I was immortal.” He frowned, his face serious, grave, the lines harsh along the edges of his mouth. “But it wasn’t unlimited—it wasn’t a gift given freely. It had a catch.” Another inhale, this one longer and more ragged than the last. “You see, I was immortal up until the point that I fell in love…and then, well, then I wasn’t. And that thought was terrifying to me.”
He leaned back slightly so that he could look her in the eye, his own pale gaze open and vulnerable for perhaps the first time ever. “But I’ve started to think that there are worse things than death.”
tobiah