[private] don't close the coffin yet; ryatah

[atrox]

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

The honesty is nearly more than he can bear.

It is painful, to be this honest. To stare into the sun of his honesty and feel his very retinas burning into char. He can taste the ash on his tongue now, and he knows that he will never be the same again. That, somehow, someway, this world has once again twisted unto itself again and speared straight to the very core of him. That it has managed to find the very center of him that he had long since thought abandoned and lost to the shifting soil of the Chamber. That he once again has something to lose.

The feeling is simply disconcerting at first, and then an echo of pain, and then a gritting of teeth.

He wants to look away and yet he doesn’t.

He looks at her instead and feels himself grip onto the thing that he is now so scared to lose. That feeling of hope that does not so much flutter poetically in his chest as it does thrash and burn. He swallows, hard, and does not move, his muscles paralyzed beneath the scarred map of his coat, yellow eyes unblinking.

She understands, he thinks, and perhaps she is the only one who truly could.

The only one who has seen him through the decades, at however far a distance. Who has suffered the losses. Played the same political games, from whichever side they were on. Who has watched the world dissolve and then remake itself. Who has cleaved themselves from who they had been to become who they were now. Who has remade themselves again and again. Each time a limb lost, a new one regrown.

“There is no possibly,” he finally manages, and he wishes for the same apathy that usually coats his words. The lack of caring that makes all things possible now lost before her. Instead there is something more dangerous than even his wicked tongue. There is just him. The stallion who led armies. Who carved through kingdoms with nothing but claw and hoof. Who sacrificed himself and rose again.

Brought to his knees before her.

He presses a rough kiss to her cheek before he drags her near again, closing his eyes and surrendering.

“I am yours.”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING