Archive of Our Own

Hatred settles in his hands like sand. It stays there, collected - collecting with every report of another compatriot slaughtered - like how sand will always find itself tumbling in a rush down the thin spine of an hourglass. Eventually it weighs his hands down, and he will attempt an easing of it, but all that does is let the sand fall across his legs. Difficult to shed, he finds it.

His bandages are rough, eternally changing like how in a year the blades of grass you stand on will likely not be the same as they are now, and neither are his eyes comforting anymore. Red fire still, yes, but too much. Easy to burn stray fingers on. He prefers this - he has not appreciated being touched in years. But this has little to do with time, though he will later find it has a lot to do with adoring. Rather, much as sand is granular and easily swept up, it comes in bits here and there. A little between his fingers, when a child is to his side crying holding a toy that hasn’t been washed in as long as she has been alive. An uncomfortable bit that sat in his hair when it was wet and now proves difficult to clean, because they haven’t had clean water in a year since the Perland military took over the nearby town they could get pails of it from.

It is the breadth of an entire desert, as he steps into the interrogation room. Violet sits in the middle with rope spun around his body to keep him on the chair as though he is a treasure to be opened forth and jewels to spill in place of his intestines, gold flecks instead of blood. The way he's been brought in speaks the situation easy enough- a difficult fight with a mix of his own blood and his compatriot’s blood spilled across his shirt (a dribble on his chin), brilliance on the part of the patrol group by recognising Violet is an executioner first and foremost, and a murderer by the masses second. Three men lost to his blade, but even he can’t cut thirteen down alone.

Lips split, a drop of that blood slipping to under his tooth, maybe down his throat, Violet whispers, “I missed you out there, you know.” The tightening of Pavel’s jaw has him grin wildly, maybe madly. This room is no place for a nobleman with legitimate claims to his love. It is therefore a good thing that Pavel thinks there is no one in here that fits that descriptor.

For his part Pavel has missed him in much the same way one misses a recurring rash. The inevitability of knowing it will return to healed skin and only aggravate what had felt so free. Sand hurts it, further, or perhaps there is some peace to find in the feeling that no matter how long that manifestation takes to come back home it will always sting upon the reintroduction. Like how one night a dream will force you awake with your chest tight like gripped by his hand as he laughs into your ear, and the next you will sleep peacefully, and then the next you will awaken with his laughter now in your mouth. No resistance. Perhaps the lack of fight in him is a bad thing.

Expression easy, smiling, yet eyes narrowed to the width of a spider’s leg. Yellow pupils incomprehensible - he could have only known indigo. His namesake’s tint replaced by gold loathed. The glow of a chandelier. The colouration of glitter. The glint of his coffers.

“Violet Harrison,” says Pavel. Papers spread across the table, beneath the splay of his fingers and the wet flat of his palm. His voice comes out rough, squeezed from his throat like lemon juice to burn his eyes. Yes, yes, if he cries later, it will be the citrus, just as it was the sand last week.

He chuckles weakly through his nose, head lolling. “As if you don’t know me,” Violet says, low and guttural. Positioning himself the predator, even when tied up, bloody and married to dirt. “You saw me last night, didn’t you? Those dark shades under your eyes. But they make them pop,” he continues, a little like he’s in awe. “So much red against that darkness. Aren’t you still a pretty lad, hm?”

“Answer the question.” It’s a formality, but a required one.

“Patriarch of House Harrison,” says Violet with precious little care of his accolades. The flamboyant waving away of a dish no longer wanted, chin tilted upwards and eyes shut in pomp.  “Commander of the Royal Guard, Her Majesty’s second in command… yes, that’d be me. You’re Pavel.”

“Who I am is irrelevant,” he replies, because it’s true. He’s not much of anything anymore, draped in what free rags they have instead of his military uniform. There isn’t much in the way of organisation around here; it’s a fight for survival, and it doesn’t matter who you are or what your title is - you get shot, you fall.

Perhaps Violet himself best portrays this. Everything that he is, and it was a stab to the leg that saw him felled. A pinprick to a behemoth; a stick to the finest cheese. Simple, so simple, you attack someone and you beat them. Nightmares avoided, maybe, or relinquished in their triumph. Heart going with it, but if it constitutes martyrdom to punish your own heart he doesn’t see why this wouldn’t also count. 

Even now, outside, he can hear the patrolman who managed the stab joyously parading, sword raised above his hand and a raucous wave of laughter coming over his collected crowd. Pavel wishes that were him. Violet simply keeps his eyes on him, marred and wound-like, pus-coloured. Glossy in the way an injury ferments horribly and leaks down your knee. The scent of the pub, refusing to give way to the typical scent of rot around here. Somehow despite it all, it’s the same God damn smile, only lit by white light instead of orange. Blindness-inducing, but he only gets a headache trying to squint nowadays. 

“Pavel,” Violet purrs anyway. (He has never taken no very well, Pavel thinks. Better than his kin, but that isn’t worth the platitude it’s mumbled on.) “Come on, now. I’ve missed you. You always flee from me now. This is the longest I’ve looked at you in years. You’re a sorry bloody sight, aren’t you? Smell like shit.”

Entertainment, they are, and Pavel knows this. Violet still makes sure to irritate him, poison ivy to his skin, words that are more rocks thrown at his back than they are a means to communicate. “Sir Klaut would see your execution. We intend on it within the week - though we grant the Queen an opportunity to release our soldiers in exchange for you. A missive is on its way as we speak.” He speaks firmly, knowing him. A strict hand to guide him; too many thoughts in his head to do much on his own. Pavel’s wrist is thinner than Lilias’s, but she is absent entirely here. That might be all that’s needed.

“What, no justice?”

His tone is playful. He nods his head gently, like the rocking of a chair. A mockery of shyness, crude but effective. Pavel’s frustration mounting as he looks at him in disgust; evidently, the intent, when his lips turn ever thinner in glinting smile. “Reserved for those who deserve it.”

He finds it in him to sigh. The paper creases under Pavel’s fist. “Perhaps I’m right to myself. Do I seem so simple? I don’t select the course of my life based on whimsy or luck.”

“No,” says Pavel. “You only choose them based on how far the people associated can choke your cock down.”

Violet laughs. It would sound a little like joy, if he didn’t already have the foreknowledge of what that sounded like from him and knew his joy was a silent thing that drew his lips back and coloured his cheeks. “But it almost sounds like a bad thing, from between your lips. Reductive, too.”

“Not by much.”

“No,” he agrees, bitterly, still smiling, utterly loathsome. “No, I suppose it isn’t.” If there is bait here, there is the sense that they have both gone for it. Their fingers have grazed in the midst of it. It burns terribly. Bile in his throat. Stinging in his eyes.

They take him as prisoner. The room is too good for him, so he is instead brought to a tent nearby that offers no routine light but allows for comfortable enough dirt and the tantalising hope of it, with the way the sides don’t quite line up if the wind blows too hard. Underneath the ground is soft, loamy - one of the few grandiosities of the village, that leave this quality of earth not ever wanted by them. There is enough that they can manage many crops, and even dedicate some to the simple pleasure of planting a seed and watching it grow daily. 

There is precious little for refugees to live into the next day for, but even here where their unthinkable manifests daily and blood soaks the earth and children who should be in school weep into their mother’s arms if they’re lucky (and Pavel has seen plenty who were not), some rules have followed them. If you are hungry, eat until the pangs subside and encourage another to do the same. If you are tired, let yourself rest regardless of the time of day and feel not despair at the need to shut one’s eyes. If you are a seed, you are to be planted and grow. If you are a monster, be struck down and offer evermore fertility to the ground. 

As he ties him, leaning close to him out of necessity, Violet asks, “you truly don’t recall me?” He can see his lips curled into a sharp smirk in his periphery. Sharp as his sword; maybe sharper, the potency of its slash avoiding a mark in his skin but reaching the innards of his bosom, or maybe it just knows where to strike. “Or perhaps you don't believe me. Those dreams were nasty, I suppose. I’d never want to do that to you, you understand. This is all just misfortune, and you’ve been ever-so unlucky since you were born a mutt, haven’t you?”

Pavel grunts, and ties the wire tight. He winces, inhaling sharply through his teeth, as the material clenches his skin.

“I recall Violet,” he says. “Not you.”

He snickers before he speaks, a quiet little thing that barely moves his chest. God, but it stirs Pavel’s. “Need I kiss you for you to recognise me? The press of my lips would fit perfectly against yours.”

Like the granting of a glass slipper to the right foot. No, no point in dipping into fairy tales when memories suffice; like the way how, even though he’d bought it before he’d ever known Violet existed in that large, large city, with spines taller than the heavens and monumental arches as if an embrace, his bed had just the right amount of space for them to sleep in together once they accepted embracing was perhaps always going to be something they indulged in, and it was only a matter of when the first arm slung around the other was done.

 (“You , ” Violet had said with a teasing slant of his lips, “You took forever to want a hug. But me? Just look at you - how could anyone not want to bundle you up? ”

(He’d gone bright red, flushing darker in his already soil-brown cheeks. “I never asked for one!”

( “You don’t have to! Not when you’re a cuddler when you sleep. Which is adorable , by the way.”

(Illusions were unnecessary, not as long as his heart still beat. Nostalgia palpable when he snickered, bringing to mind moments of playful taunt, indolent days passed like August. Daylight stretched further and further, and it was never the next until they finally slept at four in the morning to rise at noon in the day. Eight short hours of arms slung, breaths passed, touching each other’s dreams in the same way he remembers he would the stars above when younger.

(No, he knows the truth. No profound change has happened. Only a decision. Violet has always made bad ones - this is merely the first that was presented so poorly. He always liked to make things Pavel’s problem too.)

“Save that for your queen’s ass,” Pavel mumbles as he carefully inspects the wires. Perhaps they’re a little too tight; his skin has already gone a gentle crimson against them, like the way cheeks would flush upon the hearing of adoring words.

He chuckles, deep in his throat. “But I’m lonely here, and you refuse to engage? Don’t you think it cruel?”

He loosens them a little, in the end. It wouldn’t do for his hands to fall off and for him to escape that way. His resourcefulness cannot be underestimated, even in the past when there was little need for him to draw breath. He leans over him as he replies, “I think it appropriate,” and this is a mistake he should have learned back when he was half this size and holding back weeps from hunger - you never get too close to what yet breathes, lest the claws come out.

“Appropriateness is naught more than a status quo, Pavel,” he breathes. Smooth texture, like drawing a palm across an empty table. Not like how it feels in reality, as though it traces every individual ridge in his spine as it travels lavishly through him. Plush carpets his feet sink into. “Adhering to it - just another way of limiting yourself. You could do so much if you let yourself. That collar, God, but it looks so tight on you.”

Always with the worthless jabber. Useless chatter. Meaningless words that sound like they’ve grounding in reality. Child-like philosophising for the high-minded, the idea that they are the exception when all they are is the upholding. Individualism makes a joke of them all, and there has been no shortage of laughter since news of Violet’s imprisonment here broke an hour ago.

Pavel inhales. Somehow, his cologne still cuts sharp through the dirt. A weapon. It always hurts with him.

“You think you’re doing good,”  Violet continues in that treacherous voice. “Saving all these people who care not for Her Majesty’s regime. What if I think I’m doing good slaying them? What if they could do better than this world?”

“Who are you to define that?”

“No one,” he whispers. “But neither are you. Make no mistake, this clash is between our arrogance in assuming any of this means something.”

Pavel clicks his teeth. “No different than throwing us to the walls where the monsters lurk.” No different to them, after all. He has not fallen for an illusion in many a year, but it only takes one, and this is an especially noxious one to yet coat his lungs like tar.

“But it is, you know,” says Violet, drifting into his shoulder. “Such inequalities were only born out of differences. But Lilias, she adores all of Cidonia. She wants to relieve us of such simple issues. All of us are worth it, specks or not. She adores you, too. All you need to do is grovel at her feet, and she’ll forgive you. She’ll forgive anyone. She forgave me - it’s possible, I know it.”

He speaks like it's a proclamation. On his knees, head up, hands chained together in a twisted sort of prayer to exalt. A prayer for penance, thin skin on clean marble his pew. The crime of a lavish birth when another starves is unconscionable. To be lashed for it spares no one, but that is why his punishment wasn’t a whipping. 

“This again,” he mumbles under his breath.

“There’s space for you yet,” Violet insists, almost frantic in his whispers. “Next to her. Next to me, if that’s what you want.”

Now he shifts forwards, angles his head upwards into the croon of Pavel’s neck where his lips sink into. Gently, gently, he lets it graze the skin of Pavel's neck, and drags it upwards like he means to raise his head and look and see the flush he is bringing to his cheeks, but pauses just as he reaches the underside of this jaw. His teeth drag as he goes, a nibble held back only because he means to elongate the anticipation, not offer any gratification. Gratification is for lovers, and they are not that. Pavel’s stomach feels tight. His heart feels stopped. His head feels emptied of all but this mist.

“Not like this,” Pavel mumbles, but does not tear himself away. “Not the way she wants it.”

“You’re adorable,” Violet says back, and he feels the words through his skin right into his aorta and the deep caverns of his heart before he hears them in his ears. “Did you think you could go through life never hurting a soul? Change takes a lot. Time, effort, lives.”

“Any change that sacrifices innocents is not worth it,” Pavel hisses.

“We have long since passed innocence in our clamber over one another like rats,” he says simply - too simply - and that snaps him out of it; only when the back of his head hits the stake he’s tied against when Pavel shoves him off does his expression finally shift, splitting into a wide smirk. “Always like this, aren’t you? Didn't want to hurt either of our feelings, so you just strung us along for years because you’re scared.”

His fingers are tight as they grip the lopsided collar of his shirt, and Violet glances down unconcerned. In a low voice he snaps, “Cerise has nothing to do with this.”

“You can’t change a damn thing,” Violet tells him firmly. “You have to survive. Every single day. The devil you don’t know is worse than the one you do, and you know me so well and you know exactly how to shut me up, don’t you? Do it. Silence me! My neck is bare. Pretend you’re not the problem! Pretend you’re innocent, too!”

Pavel rocks his head against the stake again, lips pulled down. He looks deliriously happy at the knocking sound, and that makes Pavel bring him back, right up against his face. 

“ Don’t misunderstand,” Pavel murmurs, equally dark in his tone. “It’s only by the order of Sir Klaut that you still live. Otherwise, that leg wound would be in a very different place.”

He outright laughs here, a noise that sounds like how it feels to bring your nails to clay. “Oh, but of course. You and your orders. You do so love them! You love them so much I was surprised you turned your back on us, but I suppose you’ve found yourself another place to get them, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Sir Klaut delivers them with a vehemence Lilias could never have hoped to achieve.”

That sharp, crescent-shaped smile is back. “Your Majesty, to you,” Violet whispers, and then chuckles when Pavel’s face twists. “You’re a Perlander, after all.” 

“You’re not wrong,” Pavel replies, and almost lets himself smirk when Violet’s brows shoot up into the upper echelons of his forehead. “Why else would I care this much?”

He pulls a face, curiously. “Yes, I suppose, one might offer the idea that you’re fighting to renew what it used to be. Do you miss the bouquet stall we would pass by on our way to the Raider’s base?”

“I do, actually,” Pavel says. “Were that the increased taxes to pay for her military expansions didn’t drive him out of business.”

“But is that really the best?” Violet continues, unimpeded by his refusal to engage properly. It never did bother him much, the way he failed to respond at such a high frequency, but Pavel feels his frustration here - the sharpness of his fingers, angrily digging into his chest like attempting to puncture. “To return to the way it was, instead of revolting. Don’t you remember what they did to you? What they thought of you? What were you, to the Perland of old?”

What are you to the Perland of new? He doesn’t ask, but the question prompts crawling thoughts, skittering like bugs on the floor of his grey matter.

He doesn’t reply. Violet clicks his teeth and returns to leaning against the stake. When Pavel is to check later, there are marks pressed into his chest, angry welts that scream red against his dark skin. Like when you pull a flower out from the ground and dirt is clearly disturbed from the loss of its roots that spindled delicate tunnels into it, so it holds on so tight it’s like an arm ripped off. 

Activity blaring. Their little village is aflame with business, readying for violence. No one is under any assumptions the kidnapping will be taken with anything less than furiosity, so they make preparations for an attack, shoring up their defences.

Pavel’s personal preparations are simple enough - ensure he has enough bullets, press his lips to Noctis in gratitude for another sortie He will show His blessing for - and once done he returns to the tent. Visibly, Violet attempts to peer past him as he walks in, likely piqued by the noises, before his gaze snaps back to him the moment he produces a bit of bread.

He is prompt to turn his nose up. This is not so beloved a place where food can be wasted despite their relatively consistent crop yields nor is it worth his death, so Pavel gets onto his knees and splits the soft dirt under him as Violet looks at him with a droll expression, as if he could roll his eyes. He does, he thinks, as Pavel nears him, gaze going from his hands to the space between them to behind him, back to his fingers as they approach with a piece. The gagging is horrible and he shares his nausea with him, but Violet soon gives up and swallows, chest heaving and grunting in the back of his throat like a whining pup.

“Aren’t you kind?” he says softly - such spiel; such soothing words. Water to a burn, but if the water were salted - and then promptly throws it all up. He need not ask if it were intentional, again - he is too quick to regain his breath. It implies enough.

His hands yet tied, he can't wipe his spittle off his cheek, despite some very rough attempts at getting his face into his collar. This isn't a kindness, not really, for it's less about his comfort and more because the village is as well-equipped to handle a sick man as cracked teeth are at chewing, so Pavel takes the opportunity to clean him up. The man is hardly in a pretty state. He undoes one of his hands from the stake, for it to be easier to move him about, but his ankles remain tied so he can't run. 

Upon its freedom, Violet pauses briefly, to stretch it and look down at it. There is a red ring around where the wire was, and he seems to like it as his lips curl upwards and his eyes burn, regarding it like a ruby bracelet. An expensive gift from him, for they’re not easy to come by. He’d love to parade it around, show it to everyone. Look - look what he’s done to me. Isn’t it pretty?

Scrapes line his face like ornate carvings in a picture frame, a red wallop on the side of his jaw that will no doubt whine blue soon, and already he wears a dark eye so vicious it makes his life-long scarring across his eye looks almost delicate, hand-crafted and perfectly intended to bring a bizarre sort of pretty through ugly across otherwise perfection, like how gorgeous you can find the violent crashing waves in the middle of a tsunami rushing towards you. There's a prettiness underneath the ugly, Pavel knows, but a part of him struggles to find the difference, either-or. The smooth skin is utterly disgusting and the scarring sublime. 

“Lift your head up,” he orders, and Violet snorts as he acquiesces.

Firm as he tilts him by the chin to the side. He cleans him as best he can with unfiltered river water and a cloth thinner than a leaf. His breathing is calm and he is collected. Violet’s collarbone is as extreme as he recalls it, and the skin is clear. Chaste, or at least good about hiding it. That doesn’t matter. It grants him a surreal relief. As he tugs his shirt off his shoulders his fingers graze the top of his chest and Violet purrs in the back of his throat. Performative. Teasing. 

No, but he’s better than this. One must be in the light to pull another out of the dark, that’s what they always say in those books and who else can be trusted but those who are arrogant enough to put their words to ink and then moralise them? Pavel’s feet are firm. It’s Violet who’s shaky, seeing him anew. He trembles every time he touches him. The sign of a man weakened at the knees, a quaking under his feet that only he can feel. 

“Oh, but you have it bad, don’t you,” Violet chuckles, and he feels his steady hand find the plush of his thigh.

Pavel shrugs him away, and in return he simply cocks his head with a teasing grin. “You wish. Move your fucking head already.”

“No one will know, you know,” Violet murmurs with heat. “They’re outside; they trust you to handle me. And handle me you will, won’t you?”

He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He doesn’t want to. None of these are true. It takes him a moment. Just one. Meaningless, a moment of nothing. His heart is in his throat. Better than in his chest or worse, in Violet’s hands. Absolution tastes of saliva and he swallows hard . It sits in his stomach like the sun. He’s missed it so much. Violet watches this. Violet loves this.

“Shut up,” Pavel mumbles under his breath.

“Pavel,” Violet teases with a sharp-toothed grin. “When has you saying that ever stopped me?”

“There’s never a better time to start listening to me than when I’m in charge of your meals.”

Quiet as a lullaby, he says, “I do listen, if you provide the right motivation to,” as he raises his fingers, lets one gently touch his chin, another to be tucked under.

“That’s not something I care to do,” replies Pavel, lying through his teeth, ripping his head out of his hand.

The ink of his tattoo, dark as a newly-blemishing bruise, curls around his jaw isn’t the only thing that blights him - there is no shortage of scarring across his skin even below his head, some of which are old and more are new. How he wishes to contribute to this searing of his skin; provide a a tombstone within his body, steel his farewell flowers. No, not that far, much too far. A branding, maybe, or to feel the same feeling a man gets when his wife announces she is pregnant. That’s disgusting, he thinks. It isn’t too far from the truth, he suspects.

Another moment. This time, he is stuck by the thumb on the rounding of his forearm. An inanity, for he’s seen it before. It’s no different from then, besides a scar here too that rips through it like an arm band to be worn. His eyes trace it and not for the first time, he wonders where it came from. He is jealous of whatever tore through him, right down and between his legs. This does not occur to him; it will only later in the dead of night and heat overwhelming and release necessary.

“Wash me with your tongue, perhaps,” Violet whispers, lips jubilant and eyes besotted. He hates that look; too similar to the type he’d wear when the only light was a gentle tangerine from their side and drinks were in their hands, legs aching, night young though its age would never have stopped them regardless. “Like a good pup.”

He sounds rough when he responds and says, “in your dreams.”

“My, I just might. Yours too,” as Pavel brings the wet cloth back up to the rounding of his shoulder. He cringes and Violet’s laughter sounds heinous to his ears. He laughs like he hates - immensely, with appreciation, with unending devotion. 

Pavel does his best and soon is scrubbing dirt away from the links of his flesh; under the dangling skin of his ear lobe, the bridge of his nose, the corner of his lips. His neck, between his head and his body. His neck. His neck is such defenceless skin, thinner than the flesh of his heart, to be so readily run through. 

With his fingers here he could crush him by the veins. With his lips he could kiss his very blood.

He is close. He is so close. If he kills the black, does the white come back? Was there any white there to begin with, or has it always been about the gold?

He doesn’t, if only because he is a better soldier than he is at practising egotism. 

But of it all the most lovely is that slash across his leg. Red lips outline the teeth of this wound, fresh and raw and furious, yet dribbling crimson down his shin to around his calf past his ankle and water the bugs in the soil, or maybe his own little rose field to be later plucked and gifted. Pavel wishes he had been the one to give it to him, and then wishes he hadn’t thought that.

“If it gets infected?” Violet asks as Pavel dips the cloth into water. 

He turns back from the bowl, and Violet is rolling the wound in the dirt, looking right at him. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Pavel replies, and then tightens the bindings around his ankles. Around the wire, the white skin screams ruby. Violet winces with a hiss through his teeth. Pavel’s heart is in his throat. He attempts to swallow it and chokes inwards.

And then Pavel offers him water.

“There won’t be more for another day,” he says. Violet is quick to react with this frowning, his tongue peeking between lips to idly dab at their corner. When he swallows it's a rough thing, as if hoping the saliva will be a worthy substitute. It isn't, he supposes, afterwards opening his mouth without the casual air he's had while talking along. 

He shivers when the first droplet meets the dried out bottom of his lip. A sharp inhale, a softer exhale. Noises he could get if he touched him. His fingers flex around the throat of the bottle and Violet, for once, appears less than thrilled about this, blinking slowly up at him. On his knees. Pavel standing over him. Tied up. No one would know and Violet would love it, this time licking his lips. Pavel badly resists this urge, but resists it he does, and silently tips the bottle further upwards to let the water into his mouth.

A dribble escapes the corner of his mouth; Pavel catches it with his finger, Violet watching carefully. His mouth ajar. He whispers, “very kind, indeed,” and Pavel licks it off himself because he might not have his heart but he has his fucking self-control. Violet laughs again, poison and steel draped in silk touch.

Fitfully he sleeps. The moon’s domain does not extend into his flesh; his faith is unshaken, but despite it She can offer no protection from himself. Rather, to some extent it would make sense - when the creature is black in darkness, then of course it would dwell in the night and behind his eyelids, in the parts of his body where the light cannot penetrate and doesn’t reach.

The dreams: they’re quaint little things, usually - dinner at three in morning, silent and exhausted after a raid and cleaning plates in less time it took for them to arrive before promptly falling asleep - days when he doesn’t have patrol but Violet does, leaving him to peacefully treat his time like a muffin and enjoy it luxuriously before he returns, tired and complaining but beaming bright anyway because smiles are a currency too if you’ve no need for the coin - and then vice versa, when his key clicks his lock open and Violet flutters in joy at his return, quick to begin tucking himself into a coat and then push him outwards again because on his walk he discovered a darling little hole in the wall that he thinks he’d like. Sometimes it’s nothing so solid at all, merely words in baritone, the scent of his favoured cologne, the sound of his breathing when all stills for a moment and they are close enough.

But then sometimes, there is violence. No, it is false to say that. There is the after violence , when cinders have flickered to nothing and black remnants litter scorched earth like spider lilies newly blossoming. Returning home reddened by war and sore to matriarchal blood slowly dripping in a steady rhythm into a pool of blood that could, if you left it for eternity, grow ever-outwards in diameter to consume the entire city. A meadow of those pretty roses, returning to reclaim the land they lay concrete onto. Patriarchy in shambles, silence brought to his estate; a meaning cut down; a reason for birth promptly removed; left one part writhing and the other two executed.

“And you remember it, don’t you?” can come whispered in the same voice that would, a lifetime ago, proclaim themselves inseparable. “What you’d said. What you had said to me, when I stood there in the void where my home was, with my mother and father covered in white cloak and to be pulled by me up the hill. You remember it. You remember it. ”

Nothing. He had said nothing. 

And when he says nothing, she can say everything. Pavel had not said that he was there for him, so she had. Pavel had not said that he loved him, so she had. His head emptied of it all and she had spoken parasitism and fed off his agony, blood-suckling and he was oh-so full to be drunk from. Fuller than his parents, at least. 

Violet himself is an epitaph of what had preceded him. A story cannot be told through silence. It cannot make sense through nothingness. Not to someone who recognises life through the pages you can write. He hated silence; he hated it.

And he had said nothing. Apathy his lover, not Violet. 

When he awakens, its clammy hands, heart tightened as it sees itself too large for the width of his throat. Every time he visits, it wins; his chest feels drained, and if he were to look into a mirror, he would see his skin pale. Violet sees this.

“I am sorry,” he mumbles from the corner. “I am. I really am. You didn’t deserve this. I’m sorry.” Violet’s tone sounds like the smoothing over of his head by means of his palm. He could lean into it, if he felt he had the right.

The next day sees it bright out. Too bright, maybe; he winces as he rises from his tent. The horizon is uncomfortably soundless. No word from Perland remains. Furious is arguing with the guards in front of Violet’s tent, and Violet himself looks a curious mix of bored and smug by this. “You’re all fools,” he’s spitting through a grinning mouth as Pavel draws the tent curtain back. “If you think she’ll care! She knows what I am and she knows what she is and fuck it all, she knows what you are, too.”

Pavel looks at him in the corner of his eyes. He will not offer him a full glance at his face. Something about not deserving it. A fake show of it - if that were his concern, Violet has had plenty of opportunities to look at him before now. He wonders if he sees him like he does.

Yet more bait. This one, Pavel won’t resist. “And that is?”

Delighted, like he couldn’t wait to tell him, he gleefully announces, “ nothing. Meat to be split apart under our cannon fire.”

He raises his hand. Violet’s eyes glimmer, and he smiles like a besotted suitor who’s just heard the word yes. That’s what stops him. It is only a punishment if he is unhappy with it, and Violet has always overjoyed in the spilling of his blood because it blooms into a meadow under his feet. Never without a smile when he fights; nothing to do with enjoying, but because it had everything to do with amnesty by the cold steel, for roses flow between those veins and your thorns are your words, if not your pampered nails. 

Disappointed when he lowers his hand and turns away, Violet mutters, “you know me so well,” before asking, “so why won’t you hurt me?”

Asking, “do you hope I’ll fall into your arms and beg you to kiss me better?”

Asking, “So why won’t you hurt me?”

Pavel’s response: “I’m better than that.”

Violet’s response: bitter laughter. Adoring hatred. “No, you’re not, because I thought I was! Look at me! Look at what’s to come!” Yet more laughter, the edges of which sound hysteric. 

It sounds like him just trying to get into his mind. But worms never do leave dirt once they’ve burrowed in, because it’s far too comfortable. He suspects Violet regards the folds of his cerebellum the same, considering the perpetuity with which he remains affixed between them. Pavel hates this. Pavel hates him. Pavel hates himself.

“What should I have said, do you think?” Pavel whispers into his hand that night. “What could I have said?” 

No amount of seeds to plant can comfort him, when what he wants has already grown far apart from him. 

There is no real rhythm as long as Violet is there and the spectre of war hovers over them like rain clouds ready to snap, but they fall into one regardless. As the days fall into one another and the silence continues, it grows more and more likely that lying need not be added to Violet’s total sin count.

He seems not to care, even as the locale readily grows uncomfortable with his presence, ever content with remaining sitting in the same place, looking at the same things - the dirt, and following any bugs that crawl past as if to nibble on the flowers that sprout through his bandages. The light, if it ever gets through the tent. Pavel, whenever he walks in, and then smiling in that way that always looks like it's not quite right, no matter how hard he tries to tell himself it is to fit him now. Pure black isn’t something you find in nature, after all. Off hue, or the slight tinging of purple to bruise. 

“Will she really not come for you?” he lets himself ask. His voice comes out quieter than he means it to. “She must do. She loves you.”

Violet answers the question in that incredibly unhelpful way esotericism wants to be. “She was all I had. Things bled and she sung and that’s all I heard.” Pavel is unsure if anything he could say now could be sweeter than her melody.

“Is that all you follow her for?” he asks, all the same.

Earnest enough to imply this isn’t a taunt, Violet replies, “isn’t it natural? You do what you can, for the people who love you.”

“Is this love?” He gestures outwardly, to their pocket of survival in the wake of what he can do.

"Painful, but yes,” he mumbles. “I believe it is. It hurts like when Mother used to kiss me goodnight. When Father used to tell me off for another nasty rumour. That makes it true.”

A paragraph of his forbearers. Their slaughter, then, his full stop. And then the new page, and any good story will have all its subsequent chapters be impacted by what preceded it. Ink smelling of coin written onto pages crumpled up with smooth, youthful hands that wore the fragrance of dignified, appealing men, and then smoothed back out with older ones that chose resolution.

So quickly warped. Or maybe it wasn’t fast at all - time goes by ever so quick when you have fun. So say all the stories, at least. He would be willing to believe it. Winter passed much faster than in the wilds when he was curled up next to him.

“Between us, then,” Pavel allows him a whisper. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” says Violet.   All there is is her, to mould them as she sees fit. The most powerful person in the city, conqueror hopeful and in her efforts, stealer of hearts.

He sighs. An obvious answer. But then, that’s why miracles are prayed for - to be inconspicuous and a rescue, like the prickles on a rose whose petals are bloated and concealing their stem.

A week later from his arrival begins as most days have begun. His orders expired three days ago, yet he visits anyway. All the words could be exchanged, and yet he will likely still feel the same way spring does when it cannot allow the snow to persist past March and so eradicates it. It is perhaps because he simultaneously has no ties to this and every tie a human can possibly have to another, that he is let in on the secret.

Furious tells it to him with lips drawn thin, at least - the war has turned him soft, to a strict contrast of hardening during trauma. No, but he understands that, when he is told:

Their missive deliverer returned to them dead. A resounding rejection, or at least no desire to meet them as equals. His execution is now reinstated and, furthermore, near.  

Despite all this, Violet appears lax. “You shan’t die like this,” Pavel urges, furiously rushing forward to him. “Not after all this. Will you really?”

“Wouldn’t it be better? Perhaps I should have died with my mother and father. Taken the lineage with me.”

“But you didn’t,” says Pavel. “You didn’t, and you’re here, and you’re not dying now, you son of a bitch.”

“You speak such faithlessness suddenly,” Violet mumbles, before growing into a chuckle. “Even you begin fretting when faced with death. Oh, to have known this sooner .”

“ My death is irrelevant,” Pavel snaps. “Just like I am. But you, you- ”

“Me,” Violet breathes. “Go on, then. What about me?”

A beating heart whose cells betrayed it and made it bleed. A mistake never corrected, only encouraged. “If you die,” he says slowly. “Then all of Perland goes with you.”

His expression twists in annoyance. “Absurdity. Perland lives as long as Her Majesty does.”

“Since when were you the type to resign your image to another?”

“I grow tired of it,” he mumbles, looking past him. “Carrying these ghosts. Let another have pictures imposed upon them.”

“Your Perland was,” Pavel rasps, frenetic. The kind of energy that should see him running, and yet he fights as though his life is on the line. In some respects, perhaps, it is. If he accepts Violet is part of him, then if he is to be shot dead… “A loving place. A place to thrive. Not to cut down. They can’t be replaced.”

“It should be replaced,” Violet tells him firmly. “It was a simplification. Nonsense. Hers can be brought to life - if there are any dreams, they can be found in her creation. Our people grow hungry while we debate the logistics of perfection.”

“You don’t believe that! You don’t believe any of this!”

“What I believe doesn’t matter ,” he hisses. “Don’t you understand that yet?” 

“I don’t,” Pavel almost cries, and he thinks he never will.

He sighs. “You fight on the wrong side if my preservation is your concern,” Violet says, as he draws his wounded leg closer, the slash still sobbing through the bandages.

Pavel thinks it's a betrayal to all but himself when he admits, “I don’t think I’m fighting at all.”

“Then you’ll come.”

Again with this. Always with this. Affection replaced with recruitment. It isn’t worth bleeding for her empire but, for him, Pavel might just consider it. Only for him, not whatever tincture she has brewed of them and places under his nose. The mixture smells of dirt. He smells of roses. Pungent, despicable, mournful roses. “I won’t.” 

“What, then?” He cocks his head. A brutal facsimile of youthhood. “You mean to stand before me and say nothing, do nothing, and beg me to do the same?”

“None of that crosses my mind.”

The corner of his lips quirk. “Little does, it seems.”

“You hate me, then,” says Pavel. I hate you, too, he finds he cannot say. Apparently, one grows accustomed to the taste of sand, swallowing it down day after day, or maybe this is just how sharp love is to be for him. He thinks he’ll never know now, regardless of whether this conclusion is meant to be a neat little thing or exactly the catastrophe he is looking at.

“No, of course not,” Violet replies, eyes earnest. “How can I? What have you done for me to hate?”

He sucks a breath in. “Your death now changes nothing.” They are on this crash course, for better or worse, and there is nothing but carnage for the foreseeable future. All it changes is whether he and, by extension, Pavel, will be a part of the meat pile.

“But it changes you ,” he says, as if in awe. “Look how you’re changing, right before my eyes. Isn’t that grand? ”

Because that’s all this was ever about. Change; the ruination of lethargy. He knows this - ultimately, he isn’t in disagreement. 

But the methods. The crying. The bleeding. The sobbing. The hunger. 

“Do you think life would have changed much, if I passed then, too?” Violet ventures. “I think the rose bushes would have fed so well. They’d be so bright and flamboyant now. Adoring the sun and sleeping under the moon. I like to believe I could do that for them. Ugly things. I planted them, you know. Pricked my hand on their roots. Perhaps I’m asleep now. I’m dreaming.”

He’s rambling, borderline incoherent. Intrinsically Pavel knows this is something to be fearful of, but he is twenty-one again and thinking to himself that the man never makes any fucking sense as is with a gentle roll of his eyes and an even gentler (like the press of feathers, like the lips of a petal, like the kiss of his cheek against his shoulders when they are huddling during cold evenings for Pavel never did have anything but a single blanket of wolf pelt to keep warm) smile, and he’s smiling, too, and the light is so gorgeous but the darkness has also always been so comforting. It has been his best time to hunt, and you cannot dine on beauty but once you drink it blood sits so heavy in your stomach as though it could be filling. 

“Perhaps,” he continues, those eyes creasing at their corners. “A nightmare.”

He looks at him, eyes soft. Thorns holding fast until now where they part for him and in some part accepting that with one kiss, the curse will break, and they will soon wither away. Death is prompt, love toiling here and there - sand between your teeth, swallowed away and putting pressure on your stomach only for another corpse to be put before you and another lot of it replaces the saliva in your mouth - but for this moment, there is opportunity to know their passing came in a context more affectionate than any smile she could give him.

“Everything,” Pavel whispers. “It was everything to me.”

Violet sighs wordlessly. He simply draws his forehead closer to his neck, tucking it there like a scared child might to ward away the scary creatures of the night.

“You’ve a cruel streak yourself,” he replies, his tone soft. “To tell me this now. To put this burden on me. How could I have guessed? I missed you. I missed you so much, all this time.”

Delivered in a voice like mist. Gone by the morning vibrancy, only protected by the night’s contemplation. The moon to bless him, like it always blessed Pavel and what is he if not his other half, to be blessed too? They know this, they know it, black mixes terribly with all colours but with white produces the grey of the concrete that would meet the heels of their boots so carefully, keeping them upright and steady despite it all. 

“I want you to speak to me,” Violet - prays, he thinks. The same tone he would speak to her with. He is not the only one he values to the point of Godhood. She is not the only one who loves him. The same feeling he would feel.

A gentle tilt of his chin. There is little light but what there is catches in his eyes, shining like old. Like when Pavel was but five and growing into his bones and looked up at the stars in the wilds. How they glimmered; his surprise, then, when Violet sparkled similarly. He is fragrant of sweat and dirt and hell and sick and his cologne has finally been lost to the earth’s clawing into his few remaining articles of clothing, and his cheeks - they burn like summer, like the way the winding river’s water is far too warm for any relief.

“I never know what to say,” Pavel breathes, and finds it difficult. It's warm, to have him in his arms. A perfect fire that flickers and crackles not beneath but around them, and slowly draws closer like how Violet’s fingers twist and then tilt into Pavel’s, when he offers them to him.

Perhaps these cinders will be better for them. The renewal may finally come, new skin to finally grow back and over the ink drawn into his skin and the scars he doesn't recognise and resents, seeds sown years ago finally to bloom in blinding brilliant. A headache is a small price in exchange for this. He so badly wants to spend this coin, even if it isn’t his to barter with. 

“Anything,” Violet nearly sobs. “Just say anything. Tell me off. Tell me I’ve done awful things. Or tell me you’re proud of me. Anything. I will accept anything. I just want to hear you.”

He need only water them. He need only water them. The thorns never parted, they will never part for he has been fooled into thinking the prince could never come for him; they are aflame in his eyes. Water is necessary, or it will all burn and it will not grow.

“I,” says Pavel, and then the words escape him again. They run from him like he is to be frightened of, even as Violet draws closer and closer. Lips against his chin. Fingers tightly curled in his palm. His weight on one leg and the other between Pavel’s, shifting delightfully.

“You would let me go?” he mumbles, and when he feels the plump of his lip find the corner of his a shudder takes him. Far from fearful, but not entirely separate. Scared in the way any virgin would be when the splitting nears their groin. “You would see me like this and then let me leave again?”

Pavel exhales. “So, this is my fault.” Victimised by silence. It isn’t much a surprise - he had never seemed comfortable when he couldn’t hear anything.

“No, no,” says Violet, the words against his lips. “Fault implies a purpose. Activity. You have done nothing. Nothing. You don’t deserve this. I believe that, I really do.”

“I’m worried about you,” he manages. Years too late, but the first illusion he has fallen for in years. Touching it does not make him sleep peacefully. Touching it, his nails following the lines (Heart first, then Life; he dodges Fate, the little defiance he can offer against whatever this is) in his palm, the bump of his cheek against his - merely only shows him dreams.

“No,” Violet continues. “No, you’re not. Not like this. Not like this.”

The topic - the voice, the sense of it all - is sensitive enough for one to almost forget notoriety isn’t earned easily. 

Three hours later, Pavel is awoken to empty arms and sound uninhibited, violence undiminished. Three guards assaulted en route. He walks somewhere in a dark rim of the village blending in perfectly, satisfied. He thinks e ven a rose, pretty as it is, pricks the mother you give it to if she fails to manage it properly. 

There’s a certain marketability to the prettiness of a bouquet of roses, at least. Venus cried and bled to make these for you, you know.

And yet you are prettier, flushed red and panting and hands shaking as you hold your sword up-

“No, I shan’t die,” he announces as Pavel approaches. “I shan’t. I can’t. ”

He staggers and yet when his leg gives out, Pavel betrays it all again and holds his arms out to catch him. The tenderness is abandoned promptly, and the sound of Violet snarling up at him is the same as the sword he has found clashing to the ground. 

“Will you speak now?” Violet ventures; urges; demands. Fingers in his collar. Heart in his throat. Noctis dim between them. Blood in his mouth and blood across his cheek and blood running down his chin and blood travelling down the protruding veins of his neck and his neck and his neck, that incredible obelisk he craves so much and doesn't know why. “Say something. Say something . Look what I've done.”

Untold complexity in the way they merely look at each other here; words will say it all, too direct, and Pavel has always been the kind to hide in the shadows.

But to drag one out of the dark, the other needs to have their feet firmly planted in the glare. The moon only reflects, he’s known from childhood - that is why he follows and protects. There is only so much he can do without him. No, he knows why.

“Had I told you I loved you,” Pavel says, voice raw. “Would you have stayed? Would you have fought?”

“With you?”

“With me.”

“What for?”

Pavel opens his mouth. “For,” he whispers. “For us.” 

His expression softens, the same expression he would wear whenever hearing any of Pavel’s inanities. The same look he would use when Pavel would tell him about a poor stomach upon eating misidentified roots, he wears to Pavel breaking his knees to pull him. “There would be no us without Perland. If that’s what you want, then she-”

“-And there would be no Perland without you,” Pavel interrupts, before throwing his arms around his shoulders and dragging him inwards, the round of his chest hitting his shoulder.

His breath stills. His eyes blow wide open. He freezes like a terrified deer, and it only makes him pull him closer, until he can feel the point of his chin butting uncomfortably into his forehead, the awkward curvature of his back as he simultaneously lets himself be embraced and pulls himself back, his heart thumping through their clothes and into his skin.

“I’ve so much I have to say to you,” he says furiously into his ear. “If you die, who do I say it all to? Lilias? ”

He speaks slowly, swallowing hard enough for Pavel to hear it in his ear. “How long will that take?”

“Our entire lives,” he hisses. “Only then do you die. I will promise you that.”

Suddenly he goes lax in his arms. “You’re terrible,” Violet mumbles. “Had only you told this to me back then… I could bathe every day and the scent of war now would never leave me."

“You were,” Pavel offers, though he knows of course, mere words could never be enough now. “My inspiration."

“And you were mine,” Violet says quietly into his shoulder. "You tore me apart."

The flames are near; his pail, inadequate. The task of running to the top of the hill for another bucket, tumbling down. Broken crowns. Perennial jewels are lost again and again, somewhere in the bushes of the dark forest surrounding the hill. Going up again. Falling down again. In some vein, the water spills; crashes against the ground. Extinguishing a fantasy, but temperatures reduced with a veil of it sliding down skin. Water is cooler than blood, he knows, for as little as it’s worth. He wonders if Violet remembers that.

If they cannot grow again - if dreams are all they wish for - nightmares all they can be given - then he will run to the top of the hill, again and again and again…

His alternative is simple, at its core. Only sometimes does his mind let him consider it, rare enough for it to be a novelty, and tonight it comes easy enough. 

The sky is usually clear for these dreams. Cloudy only sometimes, and he doesn’t much like those ones because it makes all the colours too muted. Rarely stormy, but all that means is he lingers closer in the dreamscape, for he never did enjoy getting wet. Dirt he eventually grew accustomed to, but wet he argued would leave his balance off for all his absurd swordfaire. He can’t dance amidst blades if his shoulders feel heavier than he expects! Unsurprisingly, he had used this excuse as a way to request Pavel’s fingers find their way between his shoulder blades without subtlety. But then, what has subtlety ever done for him?

No, Violet is a loud, loud person, and he hears in shouts and loves in screams. Loud enough for Pavel to hear him years later, and to sometimes be the snap of clouds during a thunderstorm.

He dreams of the sun hanging above, though to his side his expression turbulent, indigo pupils clouded over with mild frustration. “-Though, I see the appeal in passivity. I myself think I might be too active on occasion…”

“You could stand to stop being so quick to conclude,” Pavel would agree, and chuckle when Violet shoots him a grumpy look. 

“But the issue is you rarely have all the evidence, right? Why not act when you’ve got a working idea?”

“Generally, so you don’t do something stupid.”

“Who cares about being stupid?” Violet laughs. “We’re all going to make fools of ourselves one way or another.”

He will always, at some point, regardless of variation, think privately that his laughter is nice. This particular form that has visited him has Violet turned away to look at the valley he’s never been able to identify, and Pavel gets the opportunity to quietly appreciate the crooning of his lips. Much better than his earlier storm clouds. “But then, I think there’s something pleasing about it.”

“Mm?”

“Showing someone how you care with your actions.”

“But words are simple,” says Violet. “You can’t misunderstand words. But if I were to simply lean over and hold your hand, well - you’d wonder if we were friends or family or more, wouldn’t you?”

“I could ask.”

“The problem, though,” Violet replies with a polite little smile. “Is that you wouldn’t. Your quietness isn’t only an issue when it comes to initiation.”

He pouts into his hand, even as Violet reaches over to pat him on the back in reassurance. Now he’s the one frustrated, he thinks. “Then what?”

Violet hums, directing his eyes to the sky above. Clear blue - no signs of trouble. All he could wish for, naturally. “Then, I think… well, I would say it outright, I like to think. At least, when the time is right.”

“What if that time doesn’t come?”

“That’s why it’s the two of us,” Violet replies with a toothy grin. “That way, we double our chances every second of it being the right time.”

Pavel scoffs, frowning. “That isn’t how it works.”

“Then how does it?” He drops his voice, shuffles closer. Pavel goes from looking at the side of his face to right into his eyes, starlight bright even though it’s the middle of the day. “Go on, stop teasing. You could show me, couldn’t you?”

He could. Nothing stops him here. Pavel smirks at him, and then he leans over and-

-Wakes up to a stabbing pain in the side of his waist. He jerks awake, eyes snapping open instantly to see the top of the tent, the light of dawn vaguely through the slits. A night passed without inside; her blessing lapsed, clearly. In his bleariness he makes the mistake of writhing against whatever hurts, and all that serves is to tear it further into his skin. 

“You are,” Violet whispers. “ Delusional .” His wrists weep red. He has had the ability to get out of those wires this entire time, he realises in horror.

Pavel coughs and tastes blood in the back of his throat, wincing as he desperately tries to swallow it down. He tries to shift against the pain, only for the blade Violet grips tightly to sink deeper into his side; with his other hand, Violet is quick to cover his mouth with his palm before he can cry out. 

“You won’t die,” he hears him say. “Not to something like this. You promised, didn’t you? My death at your hands. It’s the valiant thing to do, we know.”

Another cough. He whimpers against his hand this time, as the pain blooms between his eyes and the alien steel through his flesh is driven in further, before Violet releases the blade to leave him pinned by it to the ground.

Like that, he kisses him. A strange comforting side to it, his lips much gentler than Pavel’s own, cracked as they are from the years of living here. No violence chases him here, much as it appears to adore surrounding him - for but a moment, this kiss is something he can almost believe really is a little piece of back then. He wasn’t lying about their lips matching perfectly. Nostalgia imbued with every slide of it, with every pause for breath before Pavel pulls him back down by the neck or Violet swoops back in to steal another, and then another, and then another, as if to make up for immolated time. All while he bleeds under him. A pool to swallow him up, this time, rose bouquets tossed aside to let them drown because the roses don't matter, none of this matters. The city doesn’t matter, no, it was always about him, and he tries to say this as hard as he can as he kisses him with the same roughness he loves him with. He tastes of blood. This doesn’t stop him.

When Violet pulls away he’s shaking. Pavel is yet firm. It’s almost as if he’s been stabbed instead. A symbiosis for only the negatives, but negative has all its been recently. He would love to smile again, seeing him happy. He wonders what that could take.

The longer locks of his hair brush against his cheeks. Despite his words, they both know he is loath to part. Pavel’s fingers are lost in his dirty shirt as he gasps and chokes and winces, and Violet’s grip the dirt Pavel lies on like he means to rip it apart. Violet says, “you’ve no idea how much I enjoy your fantasy,” in a tone that is more appreciative than it is adoring. “I want to believe it so much.”

His palm finds the top of his head, dragging forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards. Taking his time, knowing Pavel will not call out. 

“You can,” Pavel manages, in a garbled voice. Mixed up by the blood in his throat, doing its best to push past and losing itself like dispersing in a crowd and appearing on the other end dishevelled and lost. “You can. Listen to me, not her. That’s all you need to do.” The force of speaking has blood rocket up his throat, and some passes his teeth, rests on the bottom of his lip.

He lowers a finger to Pavel’s lip and collects that droplet like he means to add it to his collection. Instead, he hovers it to his mouth. “You mustn’t, Pavel,” he tells him in nary more than a breath. “These words will throw you out of here. If you won’t come with me, you must stay here.”

“So,” he grunts. “So you can kill us, when the time comes?”

He dares to wear a grim, apologetic expression on his face. “Don’t worry. Don’t you worry. You’ll get my head first, and then. I hope you fall atop me.”

Tongue to his finger, another kiss - this time, of only primal proportions. Pavel shudders. He cannot tear his eyes away, and follows the bead of it as he takes it into him, prays it reaches his stomach. 

“Be afraid,” Violet tells him, as he straightens his back. “Live in fear of that day. And then, and then- you’ll be safe. You’ll be free . I’ll make it so, I swear.”

He reaches out, weakened. Manages to graze the cuff of his trouser. Violet pauses to glance down, and then offers him the sort of smile that could almost convince him they were the wrong way around after all. That he needed the tug, not the other way around. And then he watches him pull back the drape of the tent through squinted eyes, so much pain between his brows and across his temple and throughout his body that he thinks if taught to love only through hurt, maybe this is his way of confessing. In place of a ring, a scar - equally banded, both to be worn as a symbol of affection. A scar he will care for like a babe.

Only when his steps have faded and he can no longer be heard, does Pavel call out for help. He swallows, tastes blood all around his mouth and down his throat. Somehow, despite it all, no sand.