I tried to sell my soul last night
Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite
Her words bring a sneer to his lips, though it is hollow despite the unpleasantness of it. Once he would have told her what she said was impossible. Now he knows his heart has always been there, buried under so much pain and anger and hatred that it had been nearly impossible to find.
So he does not have a response for her. Even if he did, he would not have been given the chance to say it. He feels it the moment she pulls at his emotions, and it drives him a step backwards. How could he not feel it, when the absence of rage is so foreign?
And then the love floods through him. Like a man who has been numb from cold too long feels pain when introduced to warmth, so too does he when flooded with love. It fills long atrophied muscles with a suddenness that causes them to seize, and for a moment, he forgets even how to breathe. For the first time since he had been a very young child in merciless care of a mother who despised him, tears track down his cheeks unchecked. If he had noticed them, he would have hated it. He hadn’t shown such weakness since that distant childhood nearly two centuries ago.
For a moment, he can only stare at her with the helpless devotion of a man who had so long denied his ability to love. Until that love drains away just as quickly as it had risen, leaving room only for the comfort of his painful, barren existence. Rage rises, filling him with its familiar sharp edges, a weapon he has honed over decades. Everything in him tenses to attack, lips peeling back to bare teeth as his ears press flat against his neck.
But even in his blind fury, he knows a physical attack would never hurt her. She had always bent so willingly beneath that kind of pain before. It is an attribute that had drawn him to her, that submission she gave so easily. No, he wants her to know more than just physical pain.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he snarls instead, eyes burning as he advances on her. He doesn’t wait for her to answer however. He’s not truly looking for one. “Let me fucking help you.”
He slams her stolen memories back into her with all the kindness and gentleness she had shown him while playing with his emotions. But it’s not just her memories he gives her. That’s not nearly enough. He gives her some of his as well. She wanted his truth? She could damned well have it.
Let her see the ways in which his own mother beat him senseless as a young boy. Let her witness the cruelty of a man who had learned the only way to attain what you want in this world is through violence and force. Let her finally know how she had drawn him to her time and again. How she had given him everything he needed and then left, returning to another man’s side. How he had only ever been the other man, until suddenly she wanted more than that. How he had known he would never be enough, so he ran. Let her experience his sheer panic at being trapped in her with that cave, a tiny, innocent life at his feet. Let her understand how desperately afraid he’d been of destroying the only good things that had ever had the misfortune of gracing his life.
Let her at long last understand why he had left them there, knowing that that little girl would be far better off with no father than with a father like him. A father who could only teach her about pain and hatred, because that’s all he had ever known. That in his warped way, he had loved their children, had loved her, in the only way he knew how - by sparing them from him.
Let her finally know him in the way she has always wanted so desperately to.
“Fucking choke on them,” he manages to say through breaths run ragged by his effort. More than effort. By emotion. By the pain of reliving memories he had tried to bury so long ago in order to save himself from madness.
He’s no longer sure that he succeeded.
@Ryatah