[private] then it turned into something repeating

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

She has always been the storm, but these days, she is even more volatile.

He can practically feel it crackling off her—the energy that simmers just below her skin like the promise of violence. Perhaps that is what has always drawn him to her. The shadows beneath that lovely face. The way that she could be soft and sad or murderous depending on the day. The thought that he might wake up with a knife to his throat any morning. It hadn’t always been that way, he knows. There had been a time when she had been sweet and kind, when she had been the victim of another’s storm.

Perhaps that is why she became the storm itself.

It is these kind of thoughts that he carries with him as he walks through the forest this day. These kind of thoughts that he mulls over, quietly content to try and pick apart their every interaction, her every mood. He would have thought that having the children together—and they are perfect, beautiful children—would have afforded them more stability in their relationship, but he feels as though it does the opposite.

He has never been less sure about where he stands with her.

Never more unsteady about the status of their relationship.

And yet he remains.

Quiet and brooding most days. Full of life when he entertains the twins. Today, he errs on the side of the former. He walks through the paths of twisting trees, the snow barely filtering down through the canopy. He misses Drakon’s heat as he moves further and further into the forest, but he finds that he doesn’t mind the winter that bites into his skin. It keeps him awake. Alert. Reminds him of what it feels to be alive.

And when he sees her on the path before him, he feels a different bite.

A different pain.

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known

@luster

[luster]

come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

It is easiest to be like the storms that gather beneath her skin, to be distant and volatile, to be always moving, always unraveling. She can feel that magic simmering inside her chest, feel it in her bones and in her veins, feel it like an ichor that fuels her fury in all the worst ways. She thinks there had been a time in her life where she might have been able to ignore it, to let it grow into something good, something better. But now it is just a manifestation of a pain she does not know how to tear free of her soul.

It is wounds that won’t heal, bruises that don’t fade.
It is bones broken and knit poorly back together.

She has glimpses of remembering though, moments that find her and dim that smoldering in her eyes to something soft again, something gentle. Moments like now, as she watches Fenris step into view on the path ahead and there is something like wild joy that flares to life inside her chest, dwarfing that fear and wrath as though they are such inconsequential pieces of her. It is nice when the good outweighs the burdens that have glued themselves into hands that won’t unfist, into fingers fused and knotted out of stubborn ignorance. Nice, because she knows that this feeling is the way she used to be, this lightness was the levity of her entire starlit soul.

She loves to remember, even though it burns to remember this part of her is gone. That she is less and she is broken, that she is someone she would have never wanted to know.

She has no way to know if he sees that moment of joy, that spark of affection that burns inside the soft of quiet eyes that settle on his face and refuse to leave. It would be nothing to steal into his mind and find the answer she seeks, but she has grown cautious of doing so when so many of his thoughts are shaped around the ugliness of who she has become. That thought strikes her like a stone, leaving an ache inside her chest that pushes her softness back and outwards to the periphery again.

Why do you stay? She wonders, silent and still, watching him with as much pain inside her chest as he has in his. Why don’t you take the children and leave. He should. Should have done so a thousand times over, and yet if he ever did there would be nothing left of her. Nothing but the storms behind her eyes. Nothing but a pain that would turn her to ruin, cave her in and leave her empty, leave her bleeding for every eternity.

“Fenris.” She says, and it feels like her storms have broken themselves on the rocks inside her chest, because there is something gentle in the way she says his name, something aching and honest. She takes a step, and there is a flash of yearning that crosses the blue of her face, something fragile and wanting in a way only he can coax out of her. But it is gone in an instant - not vanished but changed, ruined and made ugly by the way she stops again because she remembers how corrosive her love is, how desperately she wants to protect him from the way she loves him.  She can already see the ways she is changing him, see a darkness where there had been none before, a raggedness only their children can soothe.

“I warned you not to stay.” She says, and she is surprised by the strange hollowness of her voice as she remains rooted in place watching him with eyes like dark twin bruises. “In the whole world, you are the only one I know how to care for, the only one who means anything to me. And not even I can save you from myself.”

Luster

     i can't help but love you
even though i try not to

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

He could leave. Gods know that he has become so painfully good at it over the years. He barely left a thumbprint anywhere that he was because he never stayed long enough for it to settle. He was as volatile and fleeting as the sand that he could summon but never control. How fitting that he too could shift with the winds. Could leave on a whim. Could just go, go, go without ever needing to look back.

Except with her.

Because from the first moment she had looked at him, he had felt a hook in his belly and he had been stuck. He had wandered then, but he had felt it always—dragging him back, drawing him back to the source. Until he didn’t even pretend anymore. He no longer moved forward and left. No longer tried.

And now, with her looking at him, her breath a thunderclap in his veins, he knows that he couldn’t.

“Luster,” he says her name softly and with a hint of a smile at the edges of his lips. There is always a laugh there, something he would forever try to coax out of her, but it is muted today, darkened as she draws near. It’s like a drug in his system, the need that flares to life when she is so close. It makes no sense. Has no business being as potent as it is, but he cannot deny it and does not smother the life from it.

He fills the space that she leaves yawning between them, an addiction the creeps forward, the hunger building. He does not touch her though—not yet. He feels the way his breath fans over her neck as he stands there and the way that his stomach clenches, his pulse pounding in his head. “When have I ever listened to you, little bird,” a nickname he cannot shake no matter how ill-fitting it is looking at her now.

She is magnificent.

She is the storms and the sea.

There is nothing little about her.

But still, here next to him, he calls her that. Breathes over her neck and wonders at what kind of man he must be to want so desperately for the thing that would kill him in the end—that which has never wanted him with the same ferocity. “I do not want to be saved,” he says with a smile, eyes dark and unflinching.

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known

@luster

[luster]

come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

It is her name on his lips and that smile on his mouth. It is the constant of his gravity and the way she is always pulled back into him, always tethered no matter how many of those cords she pretends to cut. It is the way that there is only him for her, the way he is the only one strong enough to withstand the tempest of a heart breaking in perpetuity - the way he wants to stay, and even though she tries to understand it, she cannot. Because it is also the way she did not choose him back.

She saw his heart, hidden as it was, and she turned elsewhere. Turned to someone who left scars on her neck and even deeper ones in her heart, who left bruises in eyes that drowned beneath the oceans of so much pain.

She chose wrong, chose so wrong that the choice stripped her cleanly of everything she used to be. Took her love and her laughter and that starlight in her eyes, and buried it in a grave inside her own broken chest.

Still, somehow he is here. He is closing the distance between them like it is nothing, reaching out to warm the curve of her mottled blue neck with the heat of his breath, and she cannot break free of the knowledge that she does not deserve this. That she is wretched, and yet that is still enough for him. There is pain in her face when she moves to close those last inches of distance between them, when she slips beneath his neck like an echo of past familiarity and leans into the curve of his dark chest like she might be able to live there beside the steady rhythm of his heart.

“I have always loved that you call me that.” Her words are something quiet, almost stoic except for the way her mouth finds his skin and leaves kisses like constellations across the dark expanse of his throat. She has always been so good at taking. “I liked that it was mine and I would never have to share it with anyone else.” Even when he had to watch her turn to someone else.

It is either pain or bile that rises in her throat, disgust at herself and their past, at the way she still keeps him trapped in her gravity. But it is different now, changed by the way her heart is tethered to him, and she does not know if that makes this better or worse.

“I do.” She says, and the words she presses to his skin are softer than any of the light shed from the flickering of her stars floating around them. “I want it so badly it feels like I can’t even breathe.” A secret she would only ever share with him. “I am terrified you will reach into my heart and pry it apart by all the cracks.” She is whispering now, cheek pressed to his neck because nothing will ever be close enough, nothing will ever be right again. “But I don’t want to leave the only place that feels like home.” She traces her lips over the curve of his chest, presses a kiss over the beating of his heart. “I have never deserved you, Fenris.”

But I love you.

Luster

     i can't help but love you
even though i try not to

[fenris]

you know, I think it was born of a feeling that I got when I left from your home

then it turned into something repeating and I couldn’t let it alone

He would choose her every time. Over himself, over the world, over the things that should matter and yet pale in comparison to her. He would choose her and let the rest of it drown for all he cared. The only thing that came close was their two perfect children—and even that was questionable. Even that could be torn apart if he was ever put into a position where he had to choose and it is a wretched thing to know about one’s self. To know that you worship a deity that could ask everything of you and you could not say no.

But it had been that way from the very first moment for him.

From the first time they met, when she was so shy and searching so desperately for answers. From when they met and she had scars on her barely healed. When she was cold as ice and as furious as the sun. When they stand now with her pressed against him, the feeling so right and yet so akin to a knife to the throat. It makes no sense and he doesn’t try to force logic into the question. He just accepts it readily.

“You have had all of me from the first,” he says, open and honest with her, unashamed of the weakness or the vulnerability. There was no denying that she had captured his heart quickly, even when he had failed to do the same. Even now, he wonders if he is a consolation for her. A placeholder until better things come along or first loves come back to haunt him. He knows it’s a possibility. He cannot force himself to care.

He presses another kiss to her, marveling that she is close enough to allow it. That she will not drive him back with teeth and claw—yet, at least. “I would never break your heart,” he says low and slow, as if he could make her realize the truth of it by pure force. “I have never wanted anything more than to protect the very thing you say is cracked.” He stills, heart pounding in his chest, heat sweeping through him.

“I don’t give a damn about deserving, Luster. I never have.”

who’d have known that I’d ever be reeling simply from being on my own

oh, I craved and I craved and I craved and I craved to get back that feeling I’d known