I welcome the fire as I punish the love; any

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

S He isn’t sure when the ghosts in his head take physical form—when the thunder of his past becomes the thud of hoof against ground—but he recognizes it instantly. His body, trained beyond the limits of his own talent, shifts almost imperceptibly, the prey within his heart recognizing the threat and teetering along the unnatural instinct of fight or flight. He wants to twist on his haunches and rocket toward her. He wants to find relief in the fight, teeth against hide and chest against chest. He wants to rip at something until copper floods his mouth. Until his body breaks. Until he is drunk on the pain of it.

Instead, he drops his head and levels out. His stride lengthens. His body flattens out as it eats the earth.

He doesn’t know what he’s running from.

He doesn’t know what he’s running toward.

He just recognizes, somewhere in the back of his mind, that it’s not truly a threat that sits just out of the corner of his vision. It’s not truly something that he should turn his fury toward, letting it roll across the forest like the edges of a storm across the bay.  So he consumes it. He draws it inward, letting the grey and the lightning clash into his throat and into his belly. It retreats as he runs, until he nearly implodes.

When he stops and it is silent, he feels it building again, the rumbling of it not yet defeated.

He can hear nothing except the dual beat of their breathing, the sound of paired inhale and exhale.

When he finally lifts his summer eyes to her, they scorch and he doesn’t bother to hide the raw pain that radiates. A muscle in his jaw jumps when he recognizes her as female, not weak, but not an opponent, not a target. For a second, the silence between them grows taut. For a second, he considers not breaking it.

Instead, he takes a forced breath.

Instead, he just says one word:

“Why?”

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine