let the dream pull you below; Vulgaris

[vulgaris]

VulgariS

take me, take me back to your bed. i love you so much that it hurts my head.
say, i don't mind you under my skin. oh, let the bad parts in, the bad parts in.

He has deducted that she is not food except perhaps in the most dire of circumstances, both for the taste and the texture of her meat. His head tilts when she speaks his name, the sound of it strange on her tongue as she attempts to mimic the sound. Her voice is the foreign depths of trenches long forgotten by time while his is all campfire and warmth, a false promise that he is tamed and domesticated. Each of them might inspire wonder in someone trusting enough to believe creatures like them could be benevolent in any fashion. Each of them is a hunter, in the end.

She explains why she poked and prodded at him but he doesn’t seem forgiving, judging by the stern look of his eyes and the curl of his lip. The thought of him ever becoming prey is revolting to him, a slap in the face of his abilities and strengths. After all, hadn’t she been bitten because of her methods? Vulgaris had been courteous enough to deliver only a dry bite.

“You could have just asked, saved us both the trouble,” he says as he spits the last taste of her blood from his mouth. But then she spears her tentacle into the river and retrieves a frightened, flopping fish from the icy waters. It dies in a far more dramatic fashion than the creatures he hunts. No, his prey all scramble upon first impact, but their kicks and cries quickly weaken when they surrender. The venom stills their heart quickly enough that there is hardly any fight to most of them. The nerves in the fish, however, fidget and fight even when it is gone.

His wrinkles his nose at the smell of it and takes a step back. Vulgaris has no appetite for sweetness, only the copper tang of mammal blood and, occasionally, the soft flesh of pheasants or turkey. The fish smells no different than pond scum to him and so he turns his attention back to Yidhra herself.

“You think monsters are admirable?” he asks with another tilt of his head, eyes narrowed in suspicion as he speaks the words. Perhaps something as beautiful as his daughters could be considered as such, but things like Shiya or himself were worthy of no praise. They deserved no sort of kindness as being called anything other than what they truly were. But he falls silent now, quiet compared to her as she vocalizes her thoughts as though they are each a new discovery for her.

@[Yidhra]