[private] I want you to know... that I'm all yours [Offy]

[Offspring]

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

  ”You deserve it,” he says quietly, as the deep rumbling baritone of his voice is lost to the sea. ”you deserve to heal, from all that has hurt you. Including me.”

  He is all too aware of her anguish. He realized long ago that his heart was simply not meant for one – not because he was selfish, nor because he cared little for those he gave his heart to, but because his capacity for any depth of affection or devotion seemed shallow. Even as immortality slipped away from him, carving deep marks beneath his eyes and causing the tender marrow of his bones to dry and the cartilage of his joints to recede, he still feared loss.  Every moment is stolen from the unforgiving grasp of time, and it would only be so long until time had grown tired of the constant back and forth of his pathetic, feeble heart, and end the misery.

  He does not pull away when she presses closer to him. He should. (His mind wanders to Tantalize, to the love he shared with her, to the unborn son growing inside of her womb.) He still does not pull away. His heartbeat does not increase, nor does it pitter-patter in anticipation. Reagan had become more to him than sexual gratification; more to him than a brief tryst of passion beneath a setting sun. Her presence meant more to him, beyond any physical boundary. She had found her way into his heart, nestling into some small, fragmented corner. Her companionship meant much to him.

  So much that he does not flinch. He does not move.

  He does not want to hurt her, as he has done before –
  He is tired of hurting the women who hold his heart.

  None of them deserved the torment and suffering that came with it, and he did not deserve their affection – chaste or otherwise.

  He can sense the quivering emotion in her voice, but still he does not move. His crimson eye roves across the roiling sea and over the dense, swaying grass to seek out her own gaze – emerald and glimmering (with unshed tears? He cannot tell in the waning light of day, despite the intensity of his vision – perhaps because he does not want to know).

  ”I will always love you,” he says softly, quietly. ”but you deserve more than what I can give to you, Reagan. I am old, and fading,” dying, he does not say. Is death not a constant plague? The moment a newborn colt inhales its first breath, it is dying – wasting away with each passing moment, with every coming year, until he is nothing but lifeless dust and bones, drifting away on a wayward breeze. ”and soon my time will come. My immortality is gone. Lost to the fire.”

  A confession! A confession he has not shared with many. The darkness she had felt seared into her flesh that fateful night that their bodies had joined in fervent heat had taken his immortality from him, and instead, he is fire and nothing else. (He cannot help but to wonder if the darkness that had bled into that night, buried into the tight, hot canal of her womb had somehow created a darkness in the daughter conceived).

  ”The love that I have for you is different than any other. Beyond. I would only hurt you, as I have hurt all the rest. You cannot fix me,” he murmurs low to her, finally turning the broadness of his cheek to look her in the eye. ”no one can, and that is how it must be.”

OFFSPRING

another zealot with the weight of the fucking world.

@[Reagan]