He speaks of his honesty and she does not try to tell him how such a thing would be like fingers wedged into all her broken places, forcing cracks into fissures and fissures into pieces that splinter completely apart. What a loss it would be to have someone like him, someone with that absolutely ridiculous smile that makes her heart ache inside her chest and every inch of her soul burn for him. Someone who shifts, but into a puppy of all things, something small and squirming and noisy. Something she would covet until her last breath. She could never love him and then lose him, could never survive something so catastrophic.
But she doesn’t tell him because she is sure he will not understand. For her it is his gravity, his magnetism, the way she leaves and always returns back here to wherever he is. She knows she holds no such gravity, that if he is the sun, then she is just the dark that burns in perpetuity at the edges of him.
She makes no promise to be honest with him, because if that honesty would wound him, then it would live forever as a secret inside the empty space of her chest.
His muzzle moves across her cheek with a promise of whispered words, and she cannot help but close her eyes and lean into him, into whatever this moment is. It feels strangely surreal, like something she has dreamed rather than something that is truth, and when her eyes open again so suddenly it is because for one fearful instant she is afraid he will be gone. But he is still there, still close, still pressed to her skin in a way that makes her want more than this, more of him and of them. “We’re good at that.” She says, and her face is something softer now as she speaks of always finding their way back to one another.
If she knew of his doubts she would fight them away, soothe whatever wounds they left on his heart with the stubbornness of a promise that these feelings inside her chest did not come conditionally. Flesh or bone or rotting in-between, she would choose to be nowhere but here, nowhere except beside her mate.
Because that was what he would be, wouldn’t it?
There is a frown on her lips too, but in the closeness of their embrace hers is also lost in the softness of his flowered mane. “Tamlin,” but she pauses, unsure, and in this moment there is a fear that this is something she could so easily break without meaning to, a realization that she does not want to break this at all, “I don’t want space.” She can imagine his frown, his confusion, his doubt, because a moment ago she had been on the verge of leaving him again. Of disappearing. She presses her lips to his shoulder, presses her cheek to the same place and closes her eyes. “My whole life has been built on broken moments and reasons to leave. But I don’t want that.” She has never been this honest before, never this bare. “I want a reason to stay.”
She pulls back to look at him, to search his face and his eyes and the shape of his mouth - frown or smile or maybe something new? But her face is something fragile in the way glass is fragile, in the way it cracks and fissures in the moments before a new impact shatters it. She lifts her chin, and she is aware in the periphery how her horn glints like the ice inside her chest, ice that only Tamlin has been able to thaw. “I choose you. You’ve made that easy enough.” A flicker of fondness in her eyes, in this strange resolute armor she wears while she tries to be less clumsy in showing him her heart. “But no one chooses me. Not even my own mother.” These words are like broken glass on her tongue and she speaks them so carefully, so warily. “I’m going to get it wrong all the time. I don’t know how to be a family, not beyond the wolves. The teeth and the snarls and the promise-bond of mates.” Mates, that word again that makes something inside her chest hurt, a tether pulled too tight. “And I think you deserve more than I know how to give you. But I would give it all to you.”
the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight
@Tamlin