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it’s a sort of certainty you can’t deny, have never been able to deny, sliding from the stinging corners of your eyes to the dark hollow cavity you feel to be your stomach like molten metal. you know how this goes. you’ve been here before. don’t make the same mistakes again.
do you remember the bitter taste on your tongue as it fills your mouth with silly, foolish babble? the searing heat which skids across your skin when he draws near? the painful ache it stirs in your heart every time you stop to think about the truth, the impossibility of it all? do you even remember the weight that pools in the pit of your belly and cools there, sets into the shape you know all too well? (t’s never been so sharp, though, never cut at your insides quite like this.) well, it’s not as if you could ever forget.
it’s funny really, that a little slip of a thing could cause so much feeling. he’s hated, he’s admired, he’s worshiped, he’s cared for. and by you? by you he is loved. small he is, like the rest of his race, but he takes up so much space. not least in the (once presumed) sanctity of your mind, where most hazy thoughts are shaped like him and even the ones that aren’t still wear his footsteps
you wonder (and pretend it’s idle, but in truth you can’t stop) how exactly he feels about you. he calls you lethallin- he calls you friend. he lays his head on your lap and lets your fingers comb through the tangles of his hair. he stays up with you reading, long after the sun has met the horizon, comparing notes and knowledge and challenging you at every turn. you don’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all.
he brings you things: a strange glowing insect in a jar. a rare book for you to catalogue and add to the library. even just a story, told crosslegged and hands gesticulating so wildly they to knock a candelabra off a table. he brings you racing heartbeats of stunned silence and eyes meeting followed instantly by uncontrollable laughter.
he brings you yourself when he takes you to your father. he brings you a crisp white letter which you crumple and blacken with emotion, embers flicking from your fingertips only noticed after smoke begins to rise from the mess into your eyes. because if you’re honest with yourself (you rarely are) there is one truth at the core of dorian pavus and it is this- you cannot touch anything without charring it to smoke and ruin.
you fear he is not excluded from this rule, despite how bright he blazes himself. because however good he might be, you are only that much worse. he brings you a kiss, and you hope, and you fear: what if he doesn’t want me after? see, how selfish you are, you fool. he is the inquisitor, he is so many things, he is the gleam of sun through your window, he is the bright-red snap of the inquisition pennants in the breeze, and the warmth of his hands pressing yours into the soil (“we’ll make a gardener of you yet”). and you, you are dorian pavus, as big a fool for love as ever you were, undeserving and so, so selfish.
he brings you an amulet and for a second you hate it, hate yourself, hate that you have tricked him so. you made him think you deserved him, after all. you remember the look of hurt he wore at the market and it only feels worse. this- it has to change, it has to progress, you have to know. one way or another. so you visit him. i am not a nice man, you say, and how bad do you want to be? as if you are unworthy, wrong, sinful; as if you are something to be ashamed of, something hidden upstairs in a room in which you are just another piece of beautiful furniture for him to rest upon at night. that’s what you think, isn’t it? that’s what you believe about yourself?
he looks at you in that peculiar way he has, like he knows some wonderful secret but can’t- won’t- share it. he takes your face in his hands, he smiles, he runs a callused thumb over your lower lip and says, i want more. and you love him then, because nobody has ever wanted more. you love him when he says he’ll dance with you in front of the entire orlesian court. you love him when he runs across a room and leaps into your arms and kisses you like nobody is watching (they usually are). you love him when he sleeps and laughs and eats and scrapes his elbows and wiggles his toes and weaves magic with all the grace and glee of a dancer. you love him when you know he loves you. you are so busy loving you forget to hate yourself.
it’s a sort of certainty you didn’t expect, never dared to expect, starting low in your gut and expanding like a small sun, plucking at the various strings of your heart like the world’s drunkest lute player. for the first time you can remember there is no leaded poison in your bloodstream, no shackles to trip you as you walk, no brand on your forehead. for the first time, you live. you can live, you know. you can do this.
you deserve it.