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August has been nervous as of late.
Not that he would admit it outright – but recently he’s come to catch it in the smallest of things. It makes itself known to him away from prying eyes, in the quiver of his fingers when his thoughts stray to past victories.
Victories he’s won with you.
When you’re both discussing the enhancements he and the Syndicate added to the firing range, it lies brisk and warm in his chest. Then it heats up tenfold once you offer to spar with him, touting that the self-proclaimed gunmaster’s skills in hand-to-hand combat might have gotten rusty after all those years of retirement.
It’s what crosses his mind when he’s at the theatre and he wonders which shows, if any, you’d enjoy.
It’s what stabs at his heart right before a match when your name doesn’t appear on his team’s roster.
It’s what seizes him without mercy in the kitchen of the compound, what makes his breath catch the instant you lean over his shoulder and whisper how you’ll just have to wait and see if he’s as talented a chef as he claims to be in the ring…
August is no stranger to this nervousness.
Of course he isn’t — he knows how it ends.
He’s seen it firsthand in the Thunderdome; just how quickly such a feeling gets struck down. How a match made in a game as cruel as this, however sweet – can only lead to ruin.
He remembers (why, as if it were yesterday), how he dragged those nerves to oblivion with his bare hands. All the time he spent on his estate, drowning them out with white noise and whiskey, exorcising them in any way he knew.
He and Sok Leng had thought themselves inseparable. They believed back then that they would fight on for eternity; they’d sworn to each other that they would do it at the altar.
Til death do us part.
If only it occurred to them whose death it would be.
Staring at his ceiling in the dark of night, as his insides scorch with a harrowing agony that he cannot bring himself to name, August pictures you once – just once.
In his mind’s eye, sunlight accentuates your features, setting your gaze aflame with a tenderness which he does not deserve.
He prays this time around, that it won’t be yours.