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Fenrir makes you smile.
Not everyday. Not even all the time.
But he makes you smile, half-grins and shy, pleased things hidden into handkerchiefs of baby-blue and the soft, fragile skin of his shoulder blades.
You’d think that someone like Fenrir, with all his gunpowder and calloused fingers and bullets that leave no lasting harm, wouldn’t have skin like that, softer than the heat that melts the cold away and freshly washed sheets and the downy petals of jasmine that bloom on your bedside table.
You wouldn’t think a lot of things about Fenrir, not about his kindness, or the chip that should but doesn’t exist on his shoulder. Or that the privilege he shucked off like a ruined raincoat—choosing to stand with the rest, with the soldiers on the frontlines—wouldn’t be a marker of all the things he gave up, (could’ve been, could’ve had ) but a certain grace, a pronouncement of, no, this is me, this is what means something; what should mean something.
You wouldn’t think that a rich boy like that could smile so, with such weight, such gravity. There’s an effort there, you notice, in every smile. Those smiles are a choice, a strength that binds spirits that have twice fallen apart and voices a hope so… so… vulnerable that it hurts to speak in more than a whisper.
But he is. He’s Fenrir. He is, and he makes you smile. Not all the time, not everyday, but he makes you smile. And it means more than you could ever think to articulate. He makes you smile. When the days are too long, and the sky is cloudy enough to open all of the old wounds that keep breaking all your precarious stitches, and the loss of it all leaves you gaping and open-mouthed and wild with something you can’t explain, when your lungs seem to pull the whole weight of you with their tidal pull, and the only thing you can think to do is scream but you—can’t.
Just—can’t.
And he is there. Calloused fingers on your sides, just resting, like there’s a place for them there, invisible like lines of fishing string but easy enough to see in the light. The glimpses are there; they always are. They’ve always been.
And he is there, your cheek resting on his scarless shoulder blades, his voice somewhere in your chest where the rumble of it is a heartbeat in itself.
And he is there, with a smile. With a grin that splits his face into a mosaic of bright things and words spoken in ages past, unspooled in the wind like the threads of fate and left to tickle your nose; that grin, mosaics in the morning sun, stained glass and what’s left unsaid being enough because—he knows. He just knows.
And. And he’s still there. He’s… here, with his tangled hair and eyes still stuck with sleep, and dreams that you can still hear if you press close enough. And it’s still morning; that early morning quiet that you’re always hesitant to break, that sound of sacred things and secrets and knowledge that slips like grains of sand from the cracks between your fingers and the divots in your palm of a life lived without much wonder… and it’s his mouth, his tongue, his prose, his unlikely poetry—
He’s himself, he’s entirely himself when he says, “Mornin’, love,” and there’s something in you that thinks that it might be half for his pillow but you know it’s not.
A hand reaches up to brush the sleep from your own eyes, and… it’s quiet again, and he yawns so wide that you can see all the way to his back teeth, and.
He makes you smile.