[mature] this life, it feels like a prison || tantalize

[Offspring]

You're looking at an absolute zero;
I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.

  She is withdrawn, pulling deeper into herself as her raw vulnerability is tucked away where his prying eyes cannot see, leaving little else but the shadow of darkness hidden in her amber gaze. A suppressed sigh slowly emerges from his tired and weary lungs as she lurches away from him, recoiling from his gentle touch and light caress. There is a pang of dejection tugging at his hammering heart, thrusting roughly against the rigid boundary of his broad chest, but it does not last – she had suffered much in her time, as he had in his, and he can feel it within the marrow of his fortified bone that it is not him she is fearful of, but the potential that lay beneath the fervent heat of his skin and the softness of his mouth pressed along the crook of her neck. She had been hurt – so had he. Patience.

  It had been so long since he had felt any kindling of desire, and even longer since he had felt the long-forgotten adrenaline that now courses through his veins with ferocity. He does not want to let it go so soon. There is a part of him that wondered if he would ever find another connection – that wondered if he would feel drawn to another; that wondered if he would ever find a love strong enough to withstand his flawed, heavily scarred presence, strong enough to love him as he is – for who he is. She had not – she never had, or so he tells himself when the dark and quiet had settled, stifling and suffocating in the loneliness of nightfall.

  After his flesh had been boiled from the inside defending Grumblesnakes, leaving him breathless, covered in blistering welts, and dying while melted tissue oozed from every orifice, none of it had been the same. He was angry, resentful, filled with raw power and rage like he had never felt before and she – she had tried to kiss the pain and anguish away, but it had been too little, too late. When the darkness of his power began to befall his furrowed brow, she recoiled, keeping far from his blistering, scalding touch, try as he might to draw her nearer to him. He felt alone, isolated, and betrayed by the one his heart longed for most –

   Even now, as his crimson gaze traces the somber line of her angular, but feminine features, he can feel the sting of rejection stirring sediment within his blood. A knot began to form within the pit of his belly, as his stare is averted elsewhere, boring into the dry clay beneath his weight. His heart – though racing for her, ignited by the chemistry burning like a flickering ember between them – is a coiled and shriveled thing, thundering still but aching with the knowledge that he was not worth loving and she would only be as disappointed in him as all the rest had been.

  His voice has failed him, with words that were so weakly tethered to one another dying quickly upon his dark and slightly parted lips – when he is met by the warmth of her kiss, soft and feather-light, deepening with each passing moment. His whiskered mouth moves with her own, stirring a heat once more within his chest (stoking the fire; provoking the flame), only searching the plane of her mahogany skin and the gleam of her honeyed eyes once she has pulled away, her eyes peering so intently into his own. There is a shadow of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and the silence that lay between them is deafening -  with the moonlight touching her cheek and illuminating the beauty that lay beneath what was still broken.

  ”I shouldn’t have come,” he murmurs quietly, the confession heavy and unsteady. ”but I wanted to see you. I am just so tired of feeling like a walking corpse, and you - you remind me that I am alive.”

  Quietly, softly – “The truth is that I haven’t felt anything like I’ve felt with you in a long, long time, and a part of me thought –“ he pauses, breath held for a moment. ”- that maybe I never would again. But I do. With you.”

OFFSPRING

another zealot with the weight of the fucking world