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but what’s worse?
telling you my feelings or to die without revealing that
you crawled inside my head and set a fire there instead
letting all my insecurity devour me with certainty that
love is just a currency
(so take my pockets, take me whole)
He wakes in the predawn darkness, testing the weight of what’s coming heavy in his chest and heavier on his mind, until her voice curls catlike from the space between them, sleep-slurred and drenched in the honey that is her mouth.
“You’re thinking too hard.”
He feels the corner of his lips lift despite himself, drawn out of the labyrinthine twist of his thoughts as she shifts against the mattress, bare shoulder warm where it brushes against his. “Am I?” he asks, words gravel-rough in the quiet. He tilts his head toward her slightly, blurred gaze still focused on the imaginary sword of Damocles that hangs over them. Affection softens his tone. “And what makes you so sure of that?”
Her breath escapes in a long, slow sigh that ghosts across his throat. He doesn’t remember who fell asleep first, him or her. Only the heat of her body where she’d touched him, the pressure of her mouth in their tangle of lips and teeth and skin. Half drunk on Courage, the other half on each other. On what happens when the walls come down.
(He loves her, can’t remember a time when he didn’t love her. If morning carves him down to the bone, they will find that the best parts of him are always her.)
Her outline is a shadow in the dark, but he finds himself drawn to her anyway, a moth to flame as she moves closer, near enough to touch but somehow not near enough to soothe the ache in his chest, to leave her mark on the places in him where she has not been. He tilts his chin a little further to trace the shape of her with night-smeared eyes. She’s beautiful like this, even if he’s too nearsighted, too human to see more than the space she occupies. The world bends to meet her; he is no exception, caught in her gravity like the moon pulls the tides.
“Because I know you,” she says, as if it’s the simplest truth in the world. As if knowing him is a privilege and not a burden, despite his darkness, his sharp edges. She resettles to rest her cheek against his pillow. “Because you’re always thinking. Sometimes a little too much.”
A pause, then. He counts time in the spaces between heartbeats, wondering if hers add up to the stuttering of his. Asynchronous and wanting.
Her teeth flash white with the edge of a smile. “And because it’s practically audible, darling, really,” she adds after a moment, face turned up toward him in a devilish smirk. Her brows arch playfully. “I can almost hear the clicking and whirring from here. Smoke will come pouring out your ears next if you aren’t careful.”
He chuckles, a rusted thing that rattles its way free. “Apologies, dear.” His head tilts toward her a little further on the pillow. “I shall endeavor to keep the clicking and whirring to a minimum.”
(He remembers the taste of smoke, what it is to sink teeth into some unknown darkness and let it swallow him whole. What bled from him then is nothing to what clouds his vision now, caught on the way moonlight silvers warm brown skin, reflects mercurial in the ink-spill that is her hair.)
Her hands find him in the dark as the moon approaches the horizon line; wraps herself around him until she is molded to his side, the gaps in him closing at the press of her skin against his, steady and sure, every movement steeped in tenderness that aches, even as he craves it. He reaches for her, tentative, twisted up in the darkness that pools in his palm; drags knuckles over the curve of her shoulder, down her arm, traces parallel lines where hers intersect. There is an uncomplicated grace to the way she moves – takes up space and doesn’t apologize for it, settles against him as if this closeness between them is something long practiced. As if she belongs there. (She does, she always does.)
Her voice is a sleep-soaked thing in the darkness; he feels more than hears the words escape, every graze of her lips an unconscious caress, marveling at the casual intimacy of it, the way her breath whispers warm across his collarbone. “What are you thinking about?”
(Her fingers splay over the place where his heart beats – he wonders if she knows she holds it, rabbit-quick and running. Wonders if they’ll live long enough to tell her that whatever’s left of him is hers.)
He thinks a long moment before answering her, turns the words over in his head like a worry stone, newly held and not yet smooth. No matter what he tries he can’t find a way to dull their edges. They sit like a weight on his tongue, jagged and bitter. Sharp, venomous enough to rend flesh, to draw blood.
He hums instead. Offers up something akin to the truth, unwilling to shatter the peace between them. “What are any of us thinking about?”
( – the cities fall in a matter of moments: Emon, Westruun, Draconia, bleeding ice and poison and acid and flame, walls crumbled, kingdoms rent. Three dragons of five lie dead at their feet but thousands more bodies lie dead in the ruins – he doesn’t know if it’s cruelty or mercy that he won’t have to imagine what it’ll look like if Whitestone falls, that he already knows what it’s like to bury a family –)
A hand creeps up, abandoning its place above his heart only long enough for him to mourn the loss before it finds him again, cradles his face with a tenderness he’s sure is unearned, crease of her palm running tandem to the line of his jaw. She smiles at him, understanding and sad when her gaze meets his. “What happened to not thinking about dragons?”
He smiles back, brittle around the edges. (Just like everything else about him.) “Forgive me,” he says. Turns his body to face hers. “It’s far from the first promise I’ve broken.”
(He does not say that promise was made in the moments before she pressed him to the wall, lips against his like the sweetest of bruises, greedy little hands fisted in his waistcoat and taking him apart with every movement of her body. Perhaps a better man would spare her his imaginings of the worst to come.
Percy’s never claimed to be anything close to good.
[And still, something within him whispers. [He’s enough to hold her heart.])
She hums, after a moment. “We’re going to stop him, you know.”
She’s close enough he can just make out the hints of long-faded freckles across her nose; see the flash of green where moonlight dances against the tapetum lucidum of her eyes, the heart of the issue brought out into the open, cradled bleeding between them on the pillow. It doesn’t surprise him somehow, how much she sees, even when he chooses to say very little at all.
He breathes. Feels his lungs expand and contract with the effort, every breath hanging between them as if suspended. His lips brush against the heel of her palm. “Do you think we’ve done enough?”
She doesn’t answer him, then. Not at first. He waits, watching her process the question, watching her tug her lower lip between her teeth the way she does when she’s thinking. (She chews at the edges; he tries not to think about how badly he wishes to soothe the sting of it. Catch her lips with his own and gentle them, delve into the honey-sweet depths of her mouth.)
Her fingers move from his jaw, tracing a line up over his cheekbone, around the shell of his ear, palm spanning the space from his jawline to the back of his skull, all archer’s calluses and tenderness. “I think we’ve done all anyone can do,” she says. Follows the path her fingers journeyed across his skin with her eyes. “We’ve run across the world for this. Buried friends, left our homes. Chased down artifacts that belonged to gods just to give ourselves a fighting chance.” Her gaze flicks up to his. “Died a time or two in the process, too.”
He exhales, brushing his fingertips across her wrist in apology. His legs tangle with hers beneath the bedsheets, close and yearning but still not close enough. Aches at the warmth of it, the surrender.
She closes her eyes, slides her palm down to cradle the sharp edges of his collarbone, presses her pulse point over the place where his heart beats. “I think… After everything, with all we’ve done and everything we’ve worked so fucking hard to save, this has to be the end. It stops here. No more dragons. No more burning cities. No more lost homes.”
Her eyes open, ochre against viridian, a little too damp. Her voice cracks somewhere down the middle.
“No more children without mothers,” she says, barely more than a whisper. Gods, how he aches for her, wishing he could undo it. Knowing that pain so intimately, keeping its shards locked in the prison of his ribcage, still sharp, even now.
He reaches for her. Sweeps his thumb along the plane of her cheek. Follows the bone there, strong and proud, slips his fingers into the silken mass of her hair. Cradles her, like she’d cradled him, wishing he knew what to say, finding he can only offer up the syllable of her name. “Vex…”
She doesn’t accept it. Of course she doesn’t – he understands that, too, understands the need to shoulder it. He watches her eyes search him for a split second before she moves, her lips seeking his like a touchstone, and he is lost, the heat of her a beacon in the dark, chasing her like the moon trails the sun, cyclical and unending – follows her, wherever she leads, holds her as close as he dares, conscious only of everything she is, all hard edges and soft corners, unafraid of catching his fingers on the sharpness in her because he is made of broken things.
Her hands roam his skin as if she is committing every part of it to memory: his jaw, where her fingertips catch on the beginnings of stubble, rough against bowstring calluses; his throat, pale and columned, where she’d marked him with her teeth. The bone-sharp ridges of his shoulders, bruised by the kick of a rifle yet still the place she chooses to rest her head, her hands, her lips; presses back against him and he goes, willingly, sinks his spine into the mattress and brings her with him, his hands alive with the warmth of her beneath them, cradling the jut of her shoulder blade in the deep-pitted scar of his palm.
Her fingers graze his sternum. Circle the hollow of his throat. Curl and scrape against him, nails too short to leave real marks. Slide across the expanse of skin bared to her, cataloguing the scars left by so much unkindness; soothe the ones that ache, if only in his memory, until they find the fresher ones, strikes and stabs and lacerations. Burns. A brand he’d earned unwillingly. The bullet wounds that killed him, not so long ago.
She draws back, breathless, still tracing Ripley’s last mark, and he can’t see her eyes. “Just promise me one thing.”
Her voice wavers. He reaches up, tucks a loose cascade of hair behind her ear. Presses his palm to her cheek by way of answer. Finds it comes away wet.
“That you’ll come back to me this time.” Her eyes are damp, saline spilling over; her lips are trembling but she does not look away. “You’ll come back to me. All right?”
He holds her, every one of her ragged pieces cradled against the mosaic of his. Somehow it’s the easiest thing he’s ever said, even through the tightness of his throat.
“Darling…” he whispers, and presses his forehead to hers. “If you’re here, where else could I ever be?”
i think we could live forever in each others’ faces
‘cause i’ll always see my youth in you
and if we don’t live forever
maybe one day we’ll trade places
darling, you will bury me
before i bury you.