He does not fight when she sinks teeth into him.
He doesn’t push her off or deliberately push poison into her bloodstream until she bends. He does not even know that he could. Instead he hits his knees and closes his eyes, he feels tears against his cheeks and the knowing that he deserves this—that he deserves this always. He bends his horned head and feels his flesh split against her sharp teeth. He bites back the hiss of pain, the strangled cry that would otherwise rise to the surface. Instead he swallows it down and folds his wings over his back.
“You should,” he says, his throaty voice heavy, the confusion still swirling in his head. “You should,” he says again, not daring to lift his eyes to look at her. Not daring to look at the pure fury on her face. It would be like looking at the sun—like staring straight into the white hot heat and letting it sear.
“I don’t know what happened,” he says but it sounds like a dull excuse on his tongue. He wants to ask her if he’s okay. If he’s going to survive. If this is what dying feels like, but he can only feel her hot breath and the sizzle of poison under his skin. The acidic blood that now swells with poison he cannot control.
He draws it from her, keeping the blood by her mouth clean.
He directs it at himself.
It bleeds from his nose and his mouth and his eyes. Froth at the corner of his lips. Blood beginning to pool from his eyes. “It won’t happen again,” he manages, his tongue swelling, his throat closing. He blinks it away but he’s too confused, too ashamed, too weak to try and control it. All of his self-loathing manifests in the knife that he buries to the hilt in his own chest. He coughs and it splatters again.
“It won’t—,” he splutters before he falls to the ground, choking.
turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along
@[altar]