maybe you were the ocean
Wane’s life has always been comparatively easy. It read like a storybook, because Texas and Lanai loved each other. They had loved him and his twin sister, Wax - likely, still did. They’d had equal hand in raising their children, and although some may have questions some of their father’s lessons of choice, he had been a rock, an island, for them. There were no earthquakes. Nothing split them into halves, or shattered them into pieces. Wane hasn’t suffered. He hasn’t endured trauma, by any stretch of the word - in fact, Wane is quite likely as sheltered as they come.
Which in part is why he can’t see her for what she is.
But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have his own defense mechanisms; walls he’s built stone by stone from misplaced laughter and jokes that sometimes felt more like barbed wire. He didn’t often think beyond his own needs and wants, and his sense of morality was borderline at best. So if she is choosing pieces of himself, which is she deciding to keep?
Let her have them, then, if there are any she likes, because with the way she says his name next he wouldn’t have cared anyways.
“Wane,” she breathes.
The meadow is suddenly hushed, because he likes the way his name sounds on her tongue; like she’s savouring it, drawing out every letter as though they are flavours she can taste individually. She’s feeding him lines like delicacies, and he’s a glutton, leaning into her body, silently thanking her for taking the time to spit venom in his direction.
And maybe it’s the violence in the rain that makes him reckless, or the way she lets him nibble at the soft patch behind her ears still, but just like that she has him. He isn’t willing to admit it, to say it aloud - but it’s there, in the simple lines of his body, in the nothing-space between their skin. He has found his match, he thinks.
He’s never met a monster before.
When she asks where he lives he lifts his lips from her ears, watching for shivering chains of glittering scales. It’s likely she wouldn’t like the real answer - that he is a nomad, that there is no power to take, nothing to leech from. Wane doesn’t know this, of course, and so he answers earnestly.
“With you, I think.” A joke, paired with a smile that oozes charm like she oozes disease. He is definitely more charming than usual today.
“Although I’ve been spending some time in Nerine. You?”
@[Khuma]