09-11-2017, 01:52 PM
You're looking at an absolute zero;
I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.
The regret looming within the shadow of her gaze does not go unnoticed – she is elsewhere for a moment, with the weight of a long-buried memory settled heavily on her shoulders. He knew the feeling all too well. He had spent so much of his youth tucking away the wretched memories that had taken his heart and crushed it, burying each one as deeply into the dark crevices of his mind – if he stopped to contemplate the endless sea and its roiling current, he can still remember the way it felt to drown, for his lungs to fill up with the salty seawater while his body collided over and over with the jagged cliffside, leaving thick and gaping wounds across the darkness of his skin. I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.
His immortality had kept him tethered to a life he had, once upon a time, so desperately tried to escape. Though he had inevitably fallen unconscious, he awoke hours later, sputtering the salty brine of the unforgiving ocean, while his grievous wounds oozed, leaving heavy scarring along his neck, his chest, his barrel. The only war he had ever truly lost was the war within himself, and it had left him disfigured, marred and marked by his failure, his heartbreak, and his feeble attempt to take his own life.
Some memories were best kept hidden away, locked away and left unspoken.
He is drawn away from his own reverie by the heat of her gaze steadied upon him, and when the glimmering fire of his meet the gilded gleam of her own, he is captivated – quietly, he glances from one eye, to the other, tracing the deep amber hidden within the core of her iris, highlighted by the fleck of goldenrod that is not unlike the warm glow of the rising sun.
She is committing him to memory – the broad plane of his face, the scarring beneath his right eye (Lagertha had left her hefty mark in the throes of battle; the pointed diamond of her armor left a thick and puckered scar beneath his eye), the darkness of his tangled tresses hanging long and low across his neck. He, in turn, is tracing the shadow of wariness above her cheek, where her graceful jawline lay, leading to the slender curve of her neck and the soft dappling of jaguar spots – ferocity defined, and the silence shared is deafening.
There is mention once again of Magnus, but he does not dwell on it – a lover, perhaps? He did not care to pry – should she desire to delve to him her history, she would, and his weary heart had learned patience. A surge of confidence and certainty seeps into his veins then, stirring his heart into a thrumming frenzy against the fiery inferno of the flame burning brightly within his chest.
There was a fleeting moment in which he wondered if he had been imagining the chemistry, brewing like a powerful tempest. As the warmth of her proximity far outweighs the temperature of his own fire, he can feel it longing to burst forth onto the surface of his skin (he does not allow it; he does not want to burn her – he suppresses it, forcing it down, swallowing it whole).
You barely know me, she says so softly, but he is so near to her, he can hear her more clearly than the tide lapping across the shore, more distinctly than his own heartbeat, pounding within his chest. How can you have so much faith in me?
”I can see what you cannot,” he muses softly, his lips tantalizingly close to her cheek, his gaze never leaving hers. ”when you have lived as long as I have, you learn to look beyond, to see between the lines.” He pauses then, studying her as the sweetness of her breath entangles with his own, and his whiskered mouth is so near to her, he may as well be murmuring against her skin, and not simply to her. ”We are not the demons we have faced – and we are not the experiences we have had,” (a sigh emerges, low and quiet – he is convincing himself of this truth, too) ”and I already see so much more than whatever secrets are keeping you. If only you could see what I see.”
OFFSPRING
another zealot with the weight of the fucking world