all the weight of my intentions; magnus

[isle]

She has been a mother enough times to recognize when life begins to grow inside her again. But this time the realization is followed by entirely new feelings, entirely unfamiliar worry. Before, all her children had been with the man she had loved so wholly, a man who had at one time loved her back. Their children had been planned, wanted, part of their family together.

But this had been from something different.
Something beautiful, but so less certain.

She is struck, not for the first time in her life, at this tangle of uncertainty weighed so heavily in her chest. At one time she would’ve felt joy at such a discovery, would have followed those feelings to the man who had lain with her, whispered this wonderful secret into the curve of his ear. But this man, this would be father, is still so much a stranger to her, even despite his willingness to unfold his heart to her. There are so many things she doesn’t know about him, so many aspects she fears she would never fully be able to understand. He has the wisdom of more time than she can fathom, more experiences than she will ever know in her short life.

There is a large part of her heart that wonders how someone like her could ever be enough for a soul like his. An even darker part that forces her to relive the infidelity of her husband before him, of how even he who had loved her so well had grown weary of the family they built together. Weary of her. It is a wound in her soul that runs as deep as anything inside her, a brokenness that makes her forever unsteady on her own feet.

It is because she knows her own heart well, knows the beauty and the brokenness. Knows that she is incapable of having this child with this man and not discovering feelings again that have the power to hurt her. She had tried once, to love a man who chose to love more than just her, to father children besides theirs. Had tried because what she felt for him in her heart had demanded it of her, even as it had ruined her. She would not do that again, though. There was not enough left inside her to sustain such a thing.

She closes her eyes, feels the child shift within the slender fullness of her dark belly. Has even felt the feather of a touch against her mind, a soft pressure so gentle it makes her wonder if this child will be like her. She could raise the babe on her own, not allow it to interfere with Magnus’ busy life. But he has become enough of a companion, of a friend to her in these many months that she knows without doubt he would not want her to keep this from him. There is no decision to make here.

Still, there is much worry coiled in her chest as she turns and makes her way to their favorite place on the cliff side, a spot that overlooks the ocean and the sun as sets in a world turned temporarily orange and pink. He is there waiting for her as he often is, and she is glad to find his mind is quite this evening. No turmoil, no distress, nothing to delay the words she still has no idea how to share with him.

She climbs the stony path to the natural rock landing, coming to stand quietly by his side with a familiar kiss she presses into the curve of a golden shoulder. She is quiet for a beat, wordless for a few more, and then she shifts again, her dark and white face a mask of quiet as she takes a tangle of his mane between her lips and guides his nose to the heaviest curve of her belly, to a place where it is easy to feel when their child kicks from within the womb. She releases his mane, lays those dark beautiful eyes against his so searchingly despite that she’ll know anything he thinks in just a second. “We’re going to be parents.” So, so soft.

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

Magnus would never have guessed that his life would turn out this way.

He would have never guessed at the many times his path has been broken—at the way that it has been lost underneath his feet. When he had been a boy, life had been nothing but the adventure of the jungle. It had been nothing but the reckless joys of his heart; the way his mother encouraged him to life free, to laugh and play and discover the most wild parts of himself. Then, he had served under his father and he had learned the responsibility that comes with a kingdom. He had learned what was expected of him. He had learned what it means to be a prince of two kingdoms, that his life came with work and servitude.

And then there had been Joelle, and her father Liefde.

He had learned love and sacrifice and turning a cheek to your own nature for who you love.

In his first life, he had known what it means to build a family. He had loved Joelle with the entirety of his heart. He had failed—her father, her kingdom, but most of all, he had failed her.

In his second life, he had thought he could find that again. He had been wary, slow to love, but he had tried with Minette. He had felt that slow and painful rush of it when she had told him that she was expecting, when another would join their adopted daughter Amorette. But she had disappeared.

He had failed again.

And then there was Ellyse. So sharp and wild and young—so painfully young. He had loved her without meaning to, despite everything that told him she deserved better. He had warned her so many times that his heart was a battered and bruised thing—that he was pockmarked with his history. So much had been taken from him time and time again. So much had been carved from him—and she hadn’t listened.

In the end, he had failed her too.

It is a weight he carries with him, even when he does his best to ignore it. It is a stone in his chest that settles in when sleep does finally claim him, something so rare and so fitful. These failures that he has collected over the years. The failures that have, recently, turned his life into something more reckless. Children with mares he barely knows. Children with mares he considers friends and nothing more.

Children he adores with his whole heart but children that he cannot provide a family to.

It haunts him, leaves him aching as he watches these children that are not his—not the way that the others have been, raised by and with him—leave for new adventures. Watches them care so little for his involvement in their life. And how could he blame them? He has so little to offer them.

But this is different.

She comes to him with something unreadable behind her gaze, bruises he can never quite discern, and she reaches to guide him forward. He doesn’t resist. Doesn’t try to hold back. He lets the soot of his muzzle reach forward and brush against the gentle curve of her stomach, feels the life that begins to bloom within it. His heart clenches in his chest, something like joy and fear and uncertainty rising in his throat.

He remembers being so young and so thrilled with the arrival of his firstborn.

He remembers the recent pain of watching children who are not his children.

But she doesn’t hide this from him. She doesn’t tell him and then dismiss him. She tells him and then calls them parents and it unlocks something in his chest. Unlocks  a fierce and painful joy that rushes through him—a relief. His handsome face is raw with emotion and he reacts, crushing her to him, pressing his lips to the beautiful curves of her face. “Parents,” his husky voice is thick as he continues to kiss her, continues to touch whatever piece of her that he can reach. “We’re going to be parents.”

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine

[isle]

She listens to the strands of his thoughts and wonders if they would not be better off if this role were reversed. If he could hear into her mind, listen to all these secrets she holds so close to her heart, all these weaponizable vulnerabilities she is so careful not to let anyone find. He could know her truths and her heart, know the colors of the bruises behind her eyes and never have to wonder at what he thinks he sees hidden so deep inside her, all these the fissures that race up along her being, the cracks that open up so wide she can feel pieces of who she was slipping away.

Ghosts, ghosts of her heart.
Of her past and her present.

But then there are moments like these, moments when she is sure he must already know her so deep inside despite his doubt that he does not see everything she hides away. Moments when he doesn’t fight her as she draws him closer, brings his lips to her belly so he can feel for himself the life they created together. He has so much faith in her, so much trust, and she has no idea if it is just in his nature to be this way or if it is because he thinks he sees something kindred in her. Something worth being vulnerable for.

She feels it too, in shy, wary flashes. A desire to open up to him and trust him with all the pieces of herself, not just the ones she selects so carefully, not just the pieces she wants him to see. But it is so hard to go back to that place again, to bare herself to anyone who has the power to hurt her in the way Offspring had. She had given him her heart, surrendered it so freely for him to love and protect, to keep safe for always. He had given it back in pieces, brittle fragments until it all sat in her chest again, too shattered to feel anything more than this pain that still whispers warnings in her ears.

Still, when that joy rushes into him and he drags her in close, crushes her against his body and presses kisses over every inch of her skin, she knows that it is already too late to guard against him. Knows that he is already under her skin and in her mind or else she wouldn’t have come at all, wouldn’t have claimed this role with him. But she is terrified of what this might mean, too scared to kiss him back, to shower these same affections over him when she has no idea what they mean to him. When she is carefully constructing her own truths out of worst case scenarios so that it won’t hurt so much if they come true.

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

He doesn’t mind the vulnerabilities with her.

He doesn’t mind the way that he splits open, the way that he cannot hide the darkest parts of his mind. It is a relief, in so many ways. It is a relief to know that she already knows the scars and the wounds and the parts that have never healed. It is a relief to know that she has seen the very truth of him and hasn’t turned away, not yet. It is a relief that he doesn’t need to voice it, doesn’t need to try and explain it to her.

But she is so careful.

She is a wild animal, cautious and wary and looking for danger around every corner. He can’t blame her. He can’t blame the fear she has been taught, the distrust that flashes across her beautiful features. He hates it, wants to rage against the very man he clawed up the mountain alongside, but he cannot blame her for it. And he doesn’t blame her when she doesn’t return his flood of affection. He doesn’t blame her when she stiffens slightly in his embrace, when she withdraws into herself, pulling back behind her walls.

He slows, reins in his wild rush of emotions—even though the pound in his chest—and he is more careful. His kisses are softer, sweeter, as he brushes his lips across her forehead and then down her cheek and under her jaw. “It’s going to be okay, Isle,” he whispers, whiskey-voice quiet enough for just the two of them. “It’s going to be better than okay.” He doesn’t make promises to her; he cannot bear to whisper anything to her that may feel like a tenderness to him but feel like a ticking bomb to her.

Instead he just savors the moment, savors her.

He breaks free just a little, just so that his gold-flecked eyes can search her own, so that she can find some sort of stability there. Trust me, he wants to say, but he has no right to the words, to the plea. So instead his lips curve into a crooked smile, and he keeps a white-knuckled hold on everything that wars within him, the storms that brew and crackle in his veins. “I know,” is all he says as he presses a gentle kiss to her forehead, and then he sits quietly with her, his bruised heart responding to the call of her own.

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine

[isle]

She can tell by the direction of his thoughts, by the way he softens his hold on her, that he has noticed the wariness in her wounded heart. There a is heartbeat, precarious and fragile, where she braces for him to pull away, to withdraw from her and throw up his own cold walls to barricade himself behind. To hide from her and the way she struggles so hard to open up to him, to let him read the stories writ in pain across the surface of her heart.

But he only quiets inside, tethers the storm of his emotion so that it is not so quick to batter at her. He softens, slows, and even the heart pounding in his chest and pressed so firmly to the dark of her dappled skin seems to fade to a whisper-beat. His only concern is for her and the wild he’s recognized in the wounds she hides out of view. He cares nothing for his own heart.

It is so startling to her that she actually withdraws from him for a moment, steps back so that those wild brown eyes can find the shape of his face and the shade of something more than affection hidden in the back of such a beautiful gaze. She can hear the promises he wants to make, the ones he tries to keep buried - not to hide them from her, but to protect her from what they might make her feel again - and she is at once struck with a feeling so strong it nearly bowls her over.

There is a whisper inside her, something that managed to survive the crash of falling out of love, something that whispers and wonders and asks if maybe he is everything she thought she once had. If maybe, he is more. But a whisper, by its nature, is so easy to ignore so she pushes it away again, will let it build into something louder before she chooses to hear it again. Before she lets him see it reflected back at him in the quiet of her eyes.

He presses a kiss to her brow, and she can feel him buckling down on everything that swells inside him. All the beautiful turmoil of his golden heart. But she shakes her head at him, something so soft and beautiful creeping in to chase away the tension that had tightened in the hollow of such delicate features. “I like the sound of your soul, Magnus. You don’t have to quiet it for me.”

Then she’s slipping back beneath his neck, willing and wanting this time, settling so comfortably against the curve of his chest and the heart beating a greeting against her skin. She nips at his muzzle, so soft and with a smile on those pale, whiskered lips, tugging him back into a soft embrace with his neck slung around her. She lips at his jaw, follows the curve of it all the way to the hollow beside his mouth where she places a tiny little kiss, a promise to try like he is trying. To be as open as she knows how to be.

But there are still questions she cannot ask him, things she wonders at but has no words with which to say. Would he ever want to be more than just parents, share more than this mutual love for a life created between them? Or was this enough for him, a strange, unnameable bond between friends turned parents. But the not knowing is dissonance in her heart, a fissure tearing in this new calm she finds curled so contentedly in the warmth of his embrace. So she pushes it away, pushes the questions away. Will pretend for as long as she can that they aren’t answers she needs.

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

It feels like he has spent years at sea.

It feels like he has spent years away from dry land and she is the first taste of it. She is the first sip of honey on his tongue, and he is drunk on it. Drunk on the possibility. Drunk on that whisper of something more after the years—the decades, the centuries—of starving. It makes him wild-eyed with it. It makes it harder than ever to fight against the hope that crashes recklessly against his rib cage, that threatens to swallow him whole. Because he has never been one to have happy endings.

And he isn’t sure that he can survive another bitter one.

But the look in her eyes, the way she closes the distance between them again, makes him want to hope again. It makes him want to fling himself into the wild yonder of the possibilities. He wants to grab her hand and pull her in after him. Hope with me. Dream with me. He wants to show her the way that it can be. The beautiful, heart aching beauty of it. He wants to show her sunrises and sunsets and everything in between. He wants to show her the edge of the world and back again.

Not yet, he tells himself. Not yet.

She is a bird caged. A wild animal let loose. She is perfect in every way but haunted by the horrors of her past, and he will not ask more of her than she is willing to give. He will not push her further than she is willing to go, even if everything within him wants to lose himself in it.

He remains quiet and still, his crooked smile deepening at her words and drawing her close into his chest. Her touch ignites small fires with him, fires that crackle and burn, and he closes his eyes to steady himself, to find that core of control. To be what she needs to be and not the reckless man he knows he can be. But she drags at his resistance, tempts him, and when his gold-flecked eyes open again, they are smoldering with something he cannot name—something he cannot ignore.

“You undo me,” he finally growls softly, lips and teeth finding her, kept in check but only barely. He lingers on her jaw, on her nose. He savors the taste of her on his tongue and feels a small growl in the back of his throat. Other words rise and die on his tongue; perhaps they are the promises he has told himself he will not burden herself with, perhaps they are apologies for the state of his battered heart, or perhaps they are simply invitations into the dream they now weave together

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine

[isle]

At once the world shifts and suddenly it is his heart in her hand and she is stunned, trying so hard to remember how to hold it safe with fingers that shake so badly. It is a gift but she didn’t ask for it, isn’t even sure if she’s ready for it yet. Except that is the nature of things like this, matters of the heart. It is almost never a conscious decision to love, not something that can be so carefully planned to exist at just the right moment. There is always risk, and she can see that he understands that, just as she can see that he is choosing to leap for her anyway.

It is a wonder to listen to him now, to listen to the way in which he sees her. The way in which he feels for her. The things he thinks he wants with her and for her, the kind of life he hopes they could have. It both exhilarating and wildly intimidating, something she simultaneously wants to lean into and run from. It has always been her natural inclination to be alone, to trust only in herself, only solitude. She is wild at heart, wild in her soul, but once upon a time someone had asked her to trust him, and she had been too quick to leap. Too quick to fall into something she thought would be endless, forever.

She hadn’t even considered preparing for the crash of it, that abrupt, unexpected end.
But it had found her anyway.

But he seems to know this too - she finds some semblance of her secret truths in the hum of his thoughts - and it is a wonder that this man should already know so well what she does not have the words to say. Except, it isn’t. Not a wonder. He has lived and loved for far longer than she can begin to comprehend, is a master of the mind and hearing the unsaid, the secrets hidden in the backs of her eyes and the tired lines of her guarded face, truths she keeps buried behind other words.

She hides, but he knows her anyway.
Wants her anyway.

‘You undo me.’ He says, and she closes her eyes against these words that light old fires beneath her skin, words that, when she opens her eyes again to look at him, make those dark eyes burn with wary fire. There is nothing in her that objects when he claims her with lips and teeth, no tightening of muscle to pull away someplace safe and out of reach. But she is slow to reciprocate, some deep down place inside her wondering how far he would go without a word from her to stop. Because she isn’t sure she wants him to stop, isn’t sure anymore what she wants at all. She breathes out hard against him, pushes her nose against his jaw, teeth against the soft hollow beside the corner of his beautiful mouth - an almost kiss but then she pauses, hovers there, “what is it you think you see in me, Magnus?”

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

She is beautiful and delicate but she strips away his defenses. His armor falls to the wayside before the wild wariness in her eyes and suddenly he is vulnerable and raw with it. He has no defense against her, he has no way to keep her at bay—and his heart lurches in his chest at the realization. He has always been someone who enjoys flirtations. He enjoys women. He enjoys their company. But he has never been one to fall in love easily, never one to fall in love often. It was only the curse of an extended life that he has loved more than once at all. After the last time, he wasn’t sure that he ever would again.

But suddenly she is here and he is alive with it.

It flares in his chest and in his veins and his stomach pulls tight with it all. She returns the touch, even just a little, and there is the faintest growl in the back of his throat—something to signal the thin hold that he has on his control. “A mirror,” he says without hesitation and then shakes his head, frustrated with his inability to voice what he wants to say. He takes a deep breath, closing his eyes, gathering his thoughts.

When he opens them again, the fire still burns, but it’s different. “I’ve been alive for a long time, Isle,” a fact he doesn’t need to say—doesn’t really need to repeat. “I’ve…experienced things. Things that have changed me, molded me, made me into who I am.” A pause. “They have not always been good things.”

He swallows against the pain that rises in him, the memories that shuffle in the back of his mind. “It is difficult to be around so many people who don’t understand that—who only see the very surface of me.” It is exhausting, he wants to say. It is exhausting to just be seen as the kind leader of Tephra. To have so many who don’t understand the losses he has experienced, the blood on his hands, the agony of his life.

Even with Ellyse. She had been so young, and she had wanted to understand, but she couldn’t. He could try to explain it to her, but she had no true understanding of him—no true comprehension.

“And you understand me, empathize with me—but it’s more than that.” At this, he just leans over to press his forehead into her neck, breathing in the honeysuckle of her. “When I am with you, I don’t feel broken. I don’t feel like I just have the dregs of life left. I feel…hope.” He leans back to look at her, to study her eyes, to feel that painful, beautiful ache in his chest. “I feel more alive than I ever have in this life.”

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine

[isle]

She is no less overwhelmed in this than she has been with everything else. The weight of these truths, of his thoughts and his heart and his soul bared so willingly to her is more than she is remotely ready for. But she does not shy away from it as she might have when she first came to find him, does not wall off and close herself off so that she can safely disentangle and pull away to a place where he has no weapons with which to wound her.

But there is something shifting in her heart, or maybe the heart itself is shifting in her chest. Beating back walls and thawing ice laid over it in the span of so many wounding years - because when he stumbles through his words, staggering and frustrated and so ready to lay himself bare to her, for her, there is a reflex roaring to life inside her. A burning desire to keep him safe, to protect this heart he gives her.

And the man who gives it.

She is at once somehow hard and soft, fierce in the way she pulls him close to her despite all these broken pieces inside her. In the way she kisses his brow and curls into him, pressing closer when she can feel his mind touch on something with teeth, something that still wounds him after so many years. It is terrifying to feel this way, but she does not feel brave, does not feel strong. It is something much softer in her, something much more than boldness.

It is faith.

A deep rooted trust she thought she would never find again, would certainly never believe in, not for anyone. Not after the kind of love she had known, had given herself to so wholly, so blindly. Been carved so hollow by. But this is not like that, they are not even comparable, and it is like seeing with new eyes.

She kisses his shoulder when he lays his forehead against her neck, bending her dark, delicate body around him in a way that is reflexively protective. It is a thing she does without thought, something her heart demands of her in a way that might frighten her if she weren’t so distracted by the heat of his breath on her skin, by the words he shares directly from an ancient heart.

And she thinks she understands.

“Because I look and see you, all of you, not just an idea of who I think you might be.” A king, a hero, a friend, a lover. Easy surface things with so much more in the depths below, things too much and too hard to put into words, too impossible to share. “You aren’t broken.” She says, whispers, and it feels like a confession of what she feels but does not say, of how he is so beautiful to her in all of these unfathomable depths that he lays so bare for her. There is no part of him that she does not love.

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

He had no idea when he first met her—truly met her—that she would be the one to claim his heart.

He had no idea when they stood side by side staring at the ocean as it beat against the cliffs of Tephra that she would be the one to breathe life back into his lungs, remind him of all the beauty it has has to offer outside of work and responsibility and the sacrifices he willingly makes again and again for the crown.

But she is—she is.

Curled around and into her now, feeling the roots of them beginning to tangle around one another and grow deep into this volcanic soil, he wonders if it could have ever been someone different. If he could have ever loved someone like he loves her. The wildness in her heart and the wariness in her eyes and that fierce strength that he doesn’t even think that she recognizes that she has blossoming in her veins.

He wants it all, loves it all, cherishes it all.

He crushes her to him and feels the pulse of his heart in his throat, surrounded by the scent that is so uniquely her own. She tells him that he isn’t broken and he has to close his eyes because he has spent so long telling himself that he is—has spent so long making excuses for it, for learning how to accept it, for ignoring the ache in his gut when he thought of the jagged pieces of himself. But she tells him that he isn’t broken, and he believes her. For the first time, he believes that he is not truly broken.

“Thank you,” he whispers into the wild curls of her hair, into her poll, against her cheek. “Thank you.” He wants to say more—he wants to find some way to take what exists in his heart and put it into words, but he knows he doesn’t have to because she already sees it. She already feels it and it surges in his chest.

So he just pulls back and that same mischievous glint appears in his eyes as he stares at her and as he nips at the silken skin at the corner of her mouth. “What do you think about a few kids?”

His laugh is low and deep.

“Because I’m thinking one isn’t enough.”

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine