"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
She remembers how she had felt in the afterlife when she had been faced with Dhumin, and how she had felt like every mistake she had ever made was written across her skin like an open book for him to read. She remembers how they had not seemed like mistakes until that very moment, when she was standing before someone that was going to judge her for them – the very person that was going to analyze every sin, and she knew him well enough to know he would seek some kind of retribution. Guilt had flooded her, until she was afraid she would drown in it, followed closely by shame; shame because all of her trysts were only because someone was bored. She had let herself be degraded to nothing more than a mere tool for them to use, and she had thought, maybe, that she would try and be different.
Until the atmosphere of this meeting shifted.
Until she recognizes the way his eyes sharpen onto her in a different form, and she would be lying if she said it wasn’t exactly what she had wanted.
Because try as she might, she cannot change the very core of who she was. Though a halo glowed above her head and the sunlight glinted off the gilded feathers of her angel-wings, she would let him – or any of them – extinguish every part of her light if it was what they asked of her.
He is next to her then, and it never occurs to her to flinch away, even though she had caught the glint of his sharpened teeth. She only watches him with that erratic, jumping pulse, and a shiver races across her back during that moment where he hovers just above her skin before touching her. She trembles again where his touch lands, moving across the broken, bruised skin near her wing, and she can feel the heat that simmers achingly beneath the surface. The endless black of his coat beckons her but she doesn’t reach out; not yet. “A curse of being alive, I suppose,” she manages to murmur, but when his teeth press into the porcelain-white of her flesh she involuntarily sucks in a sharp breath.
hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive
Atrox has never been the kind fo indulge in friendships.
Never the kind to truly nourish relationships with others—and, outside of Twinge, he has never truly sought out romantic entanglements. He has been entirely selfish with his time and attention. He has been utterly self-focused, taking without bothering to give. So it is surprising to him that he comes back to her in any capacity, that he asks her questions, that he does not make the entire situation about him.
Surprising to him that he remembers her name.
But this surprise does little to dull the anger she stoked in him when she made him remember that he can no longer be remembered. Does little to dull the heat of his fury or the keen edge of his boredom—and it does not help that she responds to the feel of his teeth against her. That her eyes light up when he snaps and she presses against it, her breath faster than it should be, her body warming to the danger.
It does not help his selfish mind—does not slow it.
He can practically feel the increase in her pulse, the erratic way that it shivers through her. He growls, low and deep in his throat, scarred lips brushing against the wing again. “I know what it means to be cursed,” he finally replies and, out of curiosity more than anything, he strikes out. It’s fast, his body reacting more to the heat and the desire that pools in his belly as much as it reacts to the decades of hunting and war.
His teeth sink into her flesh, the delicate skin at the base of her wing, and her angelic blood rises up to flood over his tongue. It is warm and potent and he closes his eyes on a purr as he withdraws his mouth, his mouth stained crimson with it. He pulls back to press those same blood-stained lips to her neck, her cheek, and then down to her throat, leaving a trail behind him of her, of this moment.
“This does not feel like a curse to me,” he drawls with his mouth pressed to her neck.
“This feels like a gift.”
ATROX | THE PANTHER KING
now be defiant, the lion, give them the fight that will open their eyes
She wonders if his predatory senses can see how her blood pulses in her veins, fluttering in her throat like a caged bird – and its only form of escape was into his waiting mouth.
She is afraid, but not the way she should be. He could kill her if he wanted; she knows. He could sink his teeth into the softness of her flesh, he could tear her open with his claws and there is nothing she could do to stop him. It wouldn’t matter how prettily she begged, because it doesn’t work on men like him – she knows, because she has tried.
But, foolishly, she doesn’t think he will kill her. It’s not out of trust, because she doesn’t trust anyone, least of all him. She just doesn’t think that that is the game they are playing.
She’s been wrong before, though.
The sharpness of his teeth puncture the bruised skin near her wing and she bites back a cry, leading it to sound more like a strangled gasp in her throat. She can feel the warmth of the blood as it once more trickles down her side, the bright red of it a startling contrast against her porcelain-white skin. When he presses his mouth to her cheek, and her throat, and she feels the wetness of her own blood on his lips, it incites a shiver that races the ridge of her spine. She doesn’t understand why the wound on her side makes her blood tingle with a strange sort of electricity, a knowing sort of hum as though it was trying to lead her to an answer. She doesn’t realize she could knit the skin back together and all but erase the pain, but it’s unlikely it would even matter – nothing says she would actually do it, anyway.
“Atrox,” his name is spoken on a whisper, and for a moment her lips touch against his neck.
She always think she’s going to feel a pulse, always expects to find a steady rhythm beneath his rich, black skin, and when she is reminded there is nothing there her heart always drops, for him. “You play a dangerous game,” is all she says, with that tranquil smile still woven across her lips. He’s not the one playing the dangerous game, she already knows this. It’s the angelic-looking woman with red streaked across her body, standing far too close to the man with her own blood smeared across his lips that is in danger.
hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive
She is the perfect prey and yet does not react like prey at all.
It is the perfect contradiction—a tangled web that traps him within it. She shivers and her pulse spikes and she smiles, and he feels everything within him nearly explode in response. It is violent and everything that he does his best to hide, to bury deep within him, rises quickly to the surface in search of an outlet. The strange emptiness that comes from death and its retreat. The hollow ringing at seeing Twinge and knowing that they would perhaps never find a time and place where they lived side by side ever again.
The fury of knowing that Beqanna has taken from him once again—
and then the strange thrill at knowing, this time, she has given back.
It is decades of living in the shadows and decades of knowing nothing but the natural, predatory feel of the hunt. It is knowing that she is both familiar and yet uncharted territory—that her skin breaks so easily, even with that milky glow, and that she does not move to stop him. It all causes a thrill of excitement to race down his spine, his eyes grow overbright, his smile to widen with the blood smeared across it.
She speaks and although it sounds like a warning, it feels like a promise—like an invitation. His bloodied mouth lifts to press against her cheek, down to her own lips where he nips at the skin, not bothering to be gentle. “Any game worth playing is dangerous,” he says against the velvet of the crimson painted against the white of her, “but I expect that you know that.” He dips his mouth to her throat, teasing at the skin with his teeth, knowing that he could sink his fangs into it and find the blood so close to the surface.
“Doesn’t stop you from wanting to play though,” he pauses, “does it, Ryatah?”
ATROX | THE PANTHER KING
now be defiant, the lion, give them the fight that will open their eyes
Somewhere beneath the want and the excitement, there is a guilty sort of shame. Shame because she doesn’t respond the way that she should, shame because his teeth breaking her skin makes her want him rather than fear him. Shame because every time she tells herself she isn’t going to react like this, that she isn’t going to let herself be someone’s plaything for the night, her ability to resist anything dissipates. Her sense of logic is tarnished by her fear and replaced with desire, and it leaves her like this—
with blood smeared across her bright white coat, illuminated by her almost mocking angelic aura, and trembling with anticipation beneath the touch of the panther king.
She exhales a shuddering breath when his mouth touches her cheek, and then trails down to her lips where she feels the sharpness of his teeth against her. Instinct tells her to tuck her nose to her chest when his touch finds her throat, and yet every fiber of her screams against it. She has evolved so far past her basic instincts, though – her methods for survival were not like the rest of them, like the ones that fought when faced with fear, or tried to flee. She had learned instead to submit to it, to become obedient and sweet in the face of darkness, compliant and willing.
And so her head angles upwards, and when his teeth graze the flesh of her throat – right where her pulse flutters beneath the porcelain of her skin – her own lips brush along the nape of his neck. “I’m still alive, so I suppose I’ve learned to play fairly well,” she says quietly as she takes a daring step forward, her chest nearly touching his. “I’m still not sure just exactly what game you and I are playing, though.” The coy smile that whispers across the edge of her lips is lost in the wild tangles of his mane, where the strands run lightly through her teeth. She doesn’t know what her limits with him are, yet, and instead of playing it safe, she wants to jump recklessly into the fire.
hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive
Atrox knows little about shame—if anything at all. He has long ago stripped away his more base instincts so that he could instead revel in his predatory wants. He no longer struggles with the tension between right and wrong, good and bad. He doesn’t feel the weight of guilt should he rip out the throat of someone the world would deem innocent, and he doesn’t feel a nagging sense of expectation to be cruel to every random soul he should meet. Instead he lives in the grey—in the middle, in the place where he excels.
So he doesn’t feel any sort of confusion about sinking his teeth into her flesh in anger and then painting her crimson with it in tenderness. It does not feel wrong, or conflicting, or anything but natural.
She steps forward and he closes the distance, his broad chest pressed to hers, his bloodied mouth running down the length of her spine. “You give yourself too little credit,” he growls lightly as his teeth trail down the ridges of her back. “You play better than you think,” a pause as he laughs, low and throaty, “although not well enough to not find yourself in these kind of predicaments.” Not that she wanted to avoid them.
“Do all games need an explanation?” he ponders between small bites, not enough to break the skin of her again—not yet. He pushes away then, moving down the length of her to nip at the skin of her hip, down the slope of her to where the muscle grows thick. “What kind of game would you like for this to be?” He murmurs as he nips again but, this time, his teeth sharpen and he sinks the bite into her thigh slowly, feeling the way the skin resists and then breaks as the coppery taste of her floods his mouth once more.
ATROX | THE PANTHER KING
now be defiant, the lion, give them the fight that will open their eyes
The space between them disappears when his chest pushes against hers, and the knot that had been building in the space between her ribs is on the verge of unraveling. She is always so easily undone, and she knows that she should try harder to be something stronger, someone that was not so easily led into temptation. But his touch feels like electricity arcing across her skin, and if there is still guilt in her veins, it is swept away in the current of her want.
Because of course she wants him, like she wants all things she should not and cannot have. She wants to let his darkness eclipse her light, the way she has before, the way she always does, because she is just as predictable as she is chaotic. But most of all, she is weak; too weak to resist, too weak to walk away, too weak to recognize that she is nothing and this will go nowhere, because it never does.
Maybe the things that are whispered about her behind her back are true.
His teeth grazing the surface of her skin makes her want him closer, while simultaneously sparking fear that spreads from the corners of her heart. The faint glow that radiates from her is shrouded by the black of his skin, and her lips travel down his neck to trace the lines of muscle on his shoulder. “What makes you think I don’t want to be here?” It’s a rhetorical question, because she knows that he knows – like Carnage knows, like Ashhal knows. There was something so deeply out of place inside of her, but so far out of reach that not even she knows what it is, and not even love – not even Skellig – can fix it. They pick up on it, like a shark to a single drop of blood.
Her pulse accelerates with each small bite, the skin warming in response to where his touch lingers. He pulls away, but only to slide along her hip and involuntarily she shudders.
She can feel the way her mind goes hazy as his breath collides with the sensitive skin of her thigh, right before his teeth sink into the tautness of her flesh. She bites her lip to contain the moan that builds in her throat at the feel of her skin breaking beneath his teeth, followed by the now familiar feeling of blood as it trickles down her leg.
She does not notice the way her body begins to slowly knit the wound back together – she does not notice the difference between the strange, warming response of her healing in comparison to the sensation of wanting him.
“I don’t care what kind of game it is,” she breathes, inwardly fighting to regain some form of control over herself, but failing when she looks back at him and says with an almost imperceptible smile, “as long as I’m your favorite playing piece.”
hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive
What makes you think I don’t want to be here?
He doesn’t answer. She knows that he won’t and he feels no need to prove her wrong. She knows that he knows the fabric of her heart—that he understands the dark need that twists beneath the angelic surface. That thing that pushes her forward when the knife is at her throat. That thing that presses her head into the gunmetal and the thing that causes her to moan when his teeth press slowly into her flesh.
It is fascinating, he thinks, this thing that contorts beneath her surface.
The way that her moral compass just spins and spins.
She is more than he remembered—different than he remembered. Back then it had been so easy to just write her off as another bland, boring Light (he had never paid too much attention to see the obvious signs that pointed otherwise) and yet another pristine friend of Agetta. It was so easy to glance over what now is so obvious. But she shivers beneath his touch, grows warm and wanting, and she is not easy to ignore.
He hearts the way her breath catches, the way the moan builds, the way that she shivers. He smiles to himself as he watches her skin begins to itself together. Interesting, he thinks, but says nothing. Instead, he skims his mouth up the side of her and then begins to curve behind her. He lingers here for a moment, lets his breath roll over the silken flesh, the delicate promise of her and laughs.
“You know I don’t have favorites,” he growls lightly. “But you are not my least favorite.”
An understatement, but he’s not about to fess up to it. Instead he steps away, feeling the tension in his chest, the tug of gravity and the frustration of self-denial as he steps up her other side. His teeth skim over her other hip, the curve of her ribcage and then come to rest on his shoulder. “You have to ask to play this game,” he says, laughter in the black smoke of his voice. “But I probably won’t make you beg.”
ATROX | THE PANTHER KING
now be defiant, the lion, give them the fight that will open their eyes
Not long before this, she had stared at her reflection.
She had seen the ring of light that glowed above her head, and the satin-soft feathers that adorned her wings – pristinely white, with gold scattered throughout. She had stared at an angelically beautiful creature that did not match the wretched thing that was inside. Because even though she has always been all things light and lovely, even though she has always been delicate and soft-spoken, she is none of the things that light is made of. She is selfish and insatiable in her want – she is faithless and she is damaged beyond repair. She is everything that is ugly, dressed up in the prettiest of wrappings, and she deserves every ounce of hurt that she gets.
She has twisted it in a way that she can have some semblance of control. It started long before Beqanna, in those jungles in a land far from here, where she first began to train herself to want it. It was easier to withstand the hurt if she craved it; it was easier to weather the heartbreak if she fooled herself into not caring.
And now she was this, a false angel begging to be broken by dark gods and heartless kings, all but offering her own halo to choke her with.
She doesn’t notice the way her breathing had quickened along with the exploration of his touch, or the way her eyes drifted close in the heady haze of her want. The lightness of his mouth as he skims and grazes across the outline of her ribs and the curve of her hips makes her shudder, and her heartbeat surges again when he lingers behind her – the tension building and twisting in her chest, her muscles quivering.
But then he is alongside of her again, and her eyes open with a tilt of her head and a slow exhale of the breath she had been holding. The roughness of his voice, the way he laughs when he lays out the rules, it makes her pulse jump again. She wants to push against him, she wants to see how much is too much from her – what his limit is until he is annoyed, or enraged, or what would make her feel that instant ice-cold fear of regret in realizing she has just said or done the wrong thing.
She doesn’t, though. Not today, at least.
Instead she steps into him, mild and sweet, her lips reaching to first caress against his neck. Her touch travels slow and deliberate, a startling contrast compared to the sharp bites he had left marked across her. Her lips reach the groove of his throat, brushing along the side of his cheek, before she ducks her haloed head beneath his. With a curve of her neck her lips find his jaw, and only then does she ask in that soft, obedient way that she has learned from years of trying to appease those that wanted nothing more than to break her, “Can I play your game, Atrox?”
![[Image: atrox.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/XBppy9VY/atrox.png)
