[private] the ghosts that we knew,

[brigade]

He hadn’t expected her to agree to it.

Hadn’t expected that she would agree with it when he had continued to stumble over his words and provide her with no real reason why she should. It stills his tongue and he feels the storm growing in his chest. He nods his head for a moment, feeling the length of his snarled, tangled forelock falling down the straight length of his nose. There is a strange pride in knowing that she had agreed to come.

A strange pride in knowing that he had been able to give her a home.

Perhaps he had not been quite as bad as he had thought that that he was.

“Okay,” he says, bringing his gaze back to her, studying her with that fierce intensity, just banked behind the grey of his eyes. For a second, there is nothing but the breath between them, the silence of the winter that curls and snaps. Then he steps forward, brushes the velvet of his nose against her neck and stills, hates himself for breaching her privacy, bites his tongue and then just exhales slowly.

“It’s this way. I’ll show you the way home.”

BRIGADE

when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake