all the weight of my intentions; magnus

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

She is beautiful and delicate but she strips away his defenses. His armor falls to the wayside before the wild wariness in her eyes and suddenly he is vulnerable and raw with it. He has no defense against her, he has no way to keep her at bay—and his heart lurches in his chest at the realization. He has always been someone who enjoys flirtations. He enjoys women. He enjoys their company. But he has never been one to fall in love easily, never one to fall in love often. It was only the curse of an extended life that he has loved more than once at all. After the last time, he wasn’t sure that he ever would again.

But suddenly she is here and he is alive with it.

It flares in his chest and in his veins and his stomach pulls tight with it all. She returns the touch, even just a little, and there is the faintest growl in the back of his throat—something to signal the thin hold that he has on his control. “A mirror,” he says without hesitation and then shakes his head, frustrated with his inability to voice what he wants to say. He takes a deep breath, closing his eyes, gathering his thoughts.

When he opens them again, the fire still burns, but it’s different. “I’ve been alive for a long time, Isle,” a fact he doesn’t need to say—doesn’t really need to repeat. “I’ve…experienced things. Things that have changed me, molded me, made me into who I am.” A pause. “They have not always been good things.”

He swallows against the pain that rises in him, the memories that shuffle in the back of his mind. “It is difficult to be around so many people who don’t understand that—who only see the very surface of me.” It is exhausting, he wants to say. It is exhausting to just be seen as the kind leader of Tephra. To have so many who don’t understand the losses he has experienced, the blood on his hands, the agony of his life.

Even with Ellyse. She had been so young, and she had wanted to understand, but she couldn’t. He could try to explain it to her, but she had no true understanding of him—no true comprehension.

“And you understand me, empathize with me—but it’s more than that.” At this, he just leans over to press his forehead into her neck, breathing in the honeysuckle of her. “When I am with you, I don’t feel broken. I don’t feel like I just have the dregs of life left. I feel…hope.” He leans back to look at her, to study her eyes, to feel that painful, beautiful ache in his chest. “I feel more alive than I ever have in this life.”

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine