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He was certain he loved you when you looked at him covered in blood and didn’t flinch, when he put those bloody hands to your cheeks and you met his gaze calm and gentle, and he fell into those deep brown eyes the way one falls – well, the way he supposes one falls in love.
He doesn’t know. He’s never been in love before. Not the way he is with you, with your smiles and your brilliance and those eyes. His – he doesn’t care about his own eyes, they aren’t something he spent much time thinking about – but yours. Oh, he can spend hours staring into them. You hold secrets there. Not like his, not secrets of death and cruelty and blood (and whenever he looks at his bloody hands he remembers how you never flinched), but secrets of goodness, secrets of sweet, cool turquoise and early morning kisses and soft, summer laughter.
Secrets he works hard to protect with bloody hands, and he looks around him now, at all the bodies, and he feels the blood drying on his skin, and his head spins with exhaustion and stims and hunger. Tequila is barking something at him, and he knows Champ will just about castrate him if he just leaves, but brown eyes and turquoise secrets beckon him home, and he simply turns and walks home (he’s sure somewhere along the way someone helped him there, but he doesn’t remember that).
What he remembers is stumbling through the door, that brash, rakish smile on his face as he crashes into you. You catch him (you always catch him), and gently guide him to the bathroom, and he stares into beautiful, breathtaking brown eyes as the blood swirls pink down the drain. You never flinch from the blood, and somewhere deep and dark and sick inside his mind, he decides you’re beautiful with blood smeared on your face.
It’s such a brutal, ugly thing to think, such a brutal, ugly thing for him to put on you, but your eyes – they simply blink at him, as if knowing all those thoughts he’ll never tell, and the brown of them softens the ugliness of the blood, softens the ugliness of who he is and what he does (but you always do that, always make him soft).
His body is weak, worn out and worn down, but you’re sturdy and solid, and those brown eyes laugh silently at him, cool, turquoise promises glimmering (he’s stimmed out of his mind when it looks as if those turquoise promises are reaching out to touch him). It’s just you, putting a steadying arm around him, a grounding hand on his heart, and he’s pulling you in for a kiss.
The blood is gone from your face, and gone from him, and it’s just you in the cool water of the shower. He sinks to the floor, slumping against the wall, dragging you with him (though you always go willingly). His body is warm in the cool water, skin soft and scarred. You know all the markings by heart – the stab scars between his ribs on the left side, the proof of torture where the nerves in the elbows and knees are, burn marks on his thighs, half-covered by your own legs as you straddle him.
You’re beautiful. You’re always so beautiful, with blood, with smiles, and with cool water running across your face and down your chest. Maybe another day he’d follow the trails of water with his eyes, his lips, his tongue (and he’d keep going where the water leaves off), but now, now all he wants is those brown eyes and those turquoise promises.
You give them, cradling his head in your hands and sinking further onto his legs as his own hands cup your cheeks. “Look at me, darlin.’”
You already were. His thumbs run gently below your eyes, remembering the blood, remembering how he knew he loved you, but mostly remembering the promises of clarity and safety and constancy. You blink again, smiling, letting him see and have and love everything you are and can give, and in the spiral of his stim-addled brain, it looks once more as if those turquoise promises are reaching out to him. This time, he lets them cradle him gently (he’s too heavy to move from the shower, so you simply turn the water off and leave him to sleep, wondering what he thinks about when he has that little smile on his face).