Work Text:
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
Aventurine says it like he says all things—with the weight of a tangibility that can’t fit words on a silver tongue. Like he has never told a lie in his life, like every syllable might mean the difference between your life and death.
Have his words ever saved anyone? You don’t know, you don’t know. But it’s so easy, trying to believe they have, letting them embrace you—you in your torn sleeves face against his chest eyes pressed closed lungs gasping for breath. It’s so much easier than breathing, sinking into his arms that hold you like it’s not a sin, like it never has been. Red coats your hands, drips down slowly like sticky syrup and stains the white snow with deep crimson blooms, but you don’t care. You don’t care enough to wipe it away, you don’t care enough to even take a second glance, you don’t care nearly enough to pull away from the man holding you so gently it brings to mind the manner in which you once gathered broken porcelain—patiently, quietly, kindly in spite of the jagged edges that tried so desperately to draw blood, to scar you the way you had them.
(You wonder briefly if that is what you are to him. A broken tea set. A handful of sharp ceramic to discard. An inconvenience that might try to bite.)
Aventurine murmurs more words of comfort into your ear while you lose yourself in shock, runs his hand up and down your back even as clear, hot tears slip from the corners of your eyes and stumble onto his clothes. He doesn’t seem to have any intention of ceasing the movement, least of all for your trembling hands grasping the folds of his coat almost for dear life.
Time itself seems to stop and watch for you two, the kitsune and the human in the snow, because the sky is still white as winter when you finally rise from the bloodstained ground.
Aventurine stands with you, takes your hand and lightly presses your palm against the spot on his chest you’d assume his heart to be. There is a faint beat as if to confirm it. As if to remind you the man in front of you has a heart—inhuman as it may be.
“I’m here,” he tells you. Gently.
But you are not dumb. Not enough to let the warmth in his eyes fool you this time.
You push him away.
“Stop.”
It is entirely possible that, as of now, Aventurine is the monster he is meant to be—but the Aventurine you know, for all his jests, listens when you say stop. The fact he obeys even now gives you a small glimmer of dimmed hope.
Only one thing is certain about the kitsune anymore, it seems; it’s far too late for more of his promises. You’re already kneeling next to the torn body of a man you never loved, wiping the last of your tears away with your sleeve in a haste to make yourself presentable enough to face the one you always will, when you speak again.
“He was my husband, Aventurine.”
You have seen too much blood in one evening to remember how to hide the tremble in your voice.
“A poor excuse for one.”
He isn’t wrong. It was an arranged affair, one in which you had never quite taken to one another—or at least not he to you. Aventurine, ever the admirer of what little skin you let him expose, quickly took note of the small, discolored patches of skin around your form that never seemed to fully fade. You would brush him off every time, putting each bruise down to a different hard fall or clumsy collision, but even you could tell how poorly you lied. The kitsune was more than intelligent enough to connect the dots.
You still remember the look on his face when he first said it out loud—sharp features uncharacteristically soft, slit-pupiled eyes narrowed. It had been spring then; the air warm on your skin and the flora easy on your eyes as you collected the season’s herbs and fruits in your basket. Aventurine trailed behind you like a strangely clingy fox, occasionally helping with citrus too difficult for you to reach. At first glance, one might mistake you for a young couple; at least, if not for Aventurine’s tails.
He’d taken your hand with no warning so as to prevent you from refusing to let him see what he already knew was there. Sharp nails moved carefully to avoid scratching as Aventurine wrinkled your sleeve to expose the wrist beneath, then the elbow, then as far up as the cloth went without stretch. All patched with shades of plum and deep violet.
Unable to bear his gaze any longer, you turned away.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
You had wanted to answer him. You really did. But there were already tears flowing behind your eyes—he knows, he knows, he knows, why does he always know?—despite all your practice in not letting them gather, and you feared that they would all come spilling if you dared speak the truth. The truth, the truth, the whole truth, that you hadn’t expected a perfect marriage, that you were happy to live and die and walk and sleep alongside any honorable man, that you had long since accepted that man would never be the one you loved the way you loved the kitsune, that you would be all right so long as you could fool yourself into believing he was—but not this. Not this. Not for someone that made your home feel like anything but, that had so little patience for error, that would rather argue with hands than words, that barely let you outside alone for something as simple as picking fruit. You had wanted to tell Aventurine the truth. You would have, if only the truth weren’t that you hadn’t done so already because you had felt ashamed that there was anything to tell at all.
You thought a great many things, but none made it off your tongue.
Aventurine sensed your hesitation winning. He let go, though not without a light (comforting, maybe) squeeze of your hand.
“You know you can trust me.”
But that day feels so, so far from today.
“I was a fool to love you, wasn’t I?” you mutter, wiping that same bloodied hand along the snow.
“No.”
Aventurine settles beside you on the ground.
“No, you weren’t. You deserve so much more than this,” he says, gesturing faintly—to the body or the whole forest, you can’t tell. “You can have so much more than this.”
“All you have to do—” His hand clasps firmly around yours, unafraid of the tremble. The red leaves a faint stain on his perfect skin. “is let me give it to you.”
You don’t believe him and his new, shiny promise. You don’t. But you want so badly to, gods forgive you. It would be so easy. Just once, you want something this easy.
“Aventurine…I…”
“You know I had no intention of it coming to this, but—“ He doesn’t even bother throwing a brief glance at the corpse, already desensitized to it. “We both know you’re better off, no?” There’s unbridled excitement in his tone as he squeezes your hand again. “Now that there’s nothing to stop you from saying goodbye.”
Have you ever been at such a true loss for words? You love Aventurine, with or without all his tricks and bets and masks and facades. You never loved the excuse for a life you had without him. So why does the back of your throat still burn?
“…if we truly were to leave, where would we go?” you finally dare ask, though it’s less a genuine question than a halfhearted attempt to stall. You don’t believe him. You can’t. It’s much too good and neat and delicately wrapped to be true, even coming from a fox you know to seldom fall short of making miracles. Where is the catch? He leads you along with a treat now—but where would you be going but death that makes such a thing necessary? Does it even matter? Part of you wants to go, already, even if only to rid the world of your own weakness.
“Everywhere. Nowhere.” There’s that shine in his eye again; a shimmer not dissimilar to the glint of water in a glass, the kind of beauty reserved for those observant enough to catch it in its tracks. “Anywhere you wished.”
You decide you don’t want to look at it anymore. How unsightly you are, putting your own wants over the rest’s needs. How are you any different than your husband? How can you claim to be better? How can you think yourself deserving of what Aventurine offers? How do you do it? How do you put yourself above him, too? It must have taken time, learning to be selfish. Surely you wouldn’t leave it at this.
“Look at me, [name]. Please.”
But look at you! You are, you are, you are.
“Look at me.”
You flinch instinctively as his hand comes up to your face, a detail not missed but pushed aside as—by the jaw—he turns your face to his.
“Do you remember the day we met?”
Yes you do, yes, you do.
Not unkindly, his lone claw presses hard into the skin of your cheek. A well-practiced grace accompanies the touch; too light to mark, yet just strong enough to feel.
You remember. You remember because it was a winter day just like this one where the cold scraped at your skin like claws of ice plunging itself deep into every crevice it could find with no regard for your time, crying out for joy when it finally succeeded in bringing you down to the cold cold hard white ground, shrieking in pain when a familiar set of claws dragged you from its hold.
Still as warm, almost as desperate then as he is now.
“Yes.”
“Then you remember—”
“It wasn’t an accident,” you begin before the other half of you can stop yourself.
Aventurine blinks.
“You lied. You wanted to kill him.”
You can’t help the slight smile that graces your cold lips, even as you speak of what only a minute ago made you distraught.
“I know you did. It was too perfect. It was much too perfect to have happened by chance. You’ve been thinking of today for a long while now, haven’t you?”
So fast you feel a delay in realizing it, you’re pushed to the ground so the ice digs freely into your neck and hands, wrists held down by a weight regretfully greater than your own—still face-to-face with Aventurine, who kneels above. A strangely intimate position, isn’t it?
“I know I have been kind to you, friend, but make no mistake—” From here, you can name almost every color in his irises.
“You need me,” he breathes, so close you can feel the air warm, if only for a moment. “Not the other way around.”
Aventurine is only lying halfway. You may want him, you may love him, you may need him, but you know all too well now that the reason he saved you at all was not one of kindness or spontaneity or even ego, but of the rawest kind of love—desperation.
Since the beginning, he has needed you. Your presence, your thoughts, your voice, your heart, your love, your life.
A simple truth so embarrassing he feels the need to lie about it.
In this moment, lying still and defeated, you think you might finally understand Aventurine.
Even in the best of times, there was always a certain distance to him. A silence, a blankness, a coldness you knew no amount of time could fix.
You understand now that this is what he must have been hiding behind it; the thing above you on four feet more animal than man with its thin, shaking frame and bared fangs that barely fit in its own jaw—all panting lungs and stumbling heartbeat, unable to do anything with its own strength but exert it, unused to facing anything but fear from the creature unlucky enough to wind up beneath it.
He must have thought that if you had seen, you would have been scared. Betrayed, even. He must have assumed it would cut his carefully cultivated rapport in half, maybe even made things messier if it caused you to try running from the terms of your own contract.
He must have been terrified of your face.
But, now that you have seen, you do not feel the need to provoke that fragile fear. You do feel the need to force him into a moment of honesty.
“Kakavasha.”
His face distinctly softens at how the name sounds in your mouth.
“You know I hate it when you lie to me.”
And at that, he seems at a genuine—however brief—loss for words at how light your tone is. At how simple the turn of phrase; you do not demand so much as you request, which gets to him more than an order from anyone (or anything) else could. You can feel the tension defuse as his nose nudges itself into your collarbone, hands losing their grip on your wrists as your beloved does the very last thing you would expect from someone so unexpected; he cries.
The sound of it is not especially loud. Each sob is choked and strangely regular, like he’s not sure how to emit the noise in a way convincingly human.
Which is why you don’t mind when the sobs turn to stifled screams you guess to be a fox’s equivalent, only pulling him closer. His humanity had never been what appealed to you anyway—it had always been, instead, how identical his inhumanity was to yours. So you don’t feel an obligation to rock him back and forth, or say any of the many things you know you should. You just hold him tight, and tell him the only reassurance you believe is true.
“I’m here.”
It must look wrong, embracing a creature wearing the mask of a man with red on his hands, carefully lacing his bloodied fingers in your own. But does it feel right?
Yes. Yes, it does.