[mature] like dreams that turn to dust,

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

Atrox can understand her pain even if it never registers on his flat shark eyes. It is something that he has long ago learned how to bury, how to ignore—turning a cheek to his own agony as though he feels none of it. It was easier to pretend that he does not have the emotions than to try and navigate them. Easier even when facing her with that haunted look in her eyes like she never really did leave the afterlife.

Maybe you never did.

He shrugs, letting the darker thoughts roll off his back easily and giving her the same cavalier grin. “I don’t know. I always need a lady in distress to be my knight in shining armor. I am fairly incompetent.” His laugh is like smoke, husky and thick in his throat, and then it fades in the wind and he is left with nothing but the two of them and the fading scent of sulphur as his spectral guards fade into nothingness.

His wide-jawed head angles in thought as she answers him and, although the grin never quite fades from his dark lips, his eyes sharpen on her. “I don’t know why I do half the things that I do.” He rolls his shoulders, tail flicking behind him. “But that has never stopped me from doing them.”

Like standing in the meadow with one of the only alive souls to have known him in his prime.

Talking as though anything about their life was normal.

“Don’t worry, the compliment was an accident,” his nose twitches. “Won’t happen again.”

But she’s not thinking about him at all. She’s thinking about where they had been and he sees in the strange new lines of her face how deeply it had affected her. Affected her in ways that it had never touched him because seeing Twinge was so brief—so meaningful and yet not. Neither of them had any sort of illusions that he would stay or she would leave so it was just that: a moment.

Looking at her now though, he knows that she cannot say the same.

“Most things involving him were a mistake,” he says with a sort of huff, although it’s more of a guess than anything because he had never known the man well. “What lesson was that?”

It’s a surprisingly serious question and only after does he lighten it.

“Not that I care.”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING