— I'll break you a hundred different ways —
She comes to him, she presses herself into his space, and as always, he is caught by surprise. He still doesn’t understand how she could possibly want him in any fashion, when he has always been poor company. He is quiet and distant, with too many thoughts and not enough words. He is stoic and withdrawn, but he also knows that she has seen the way how sometimes the things she says or does causes his steel-gray lips to pull into something like a smile. She had discovered that softer side of him – carefully concealed as it was. He still isn’t sure if he will ever be able to be entirely open with her, but guarded though he may be, she knows him better than anyone ever has, or ever could.
Where once he might have recoiled when she touches him, this time, he realizes that he does not even grow tense. Instead, he lowers his head into her lips, releasing the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding when she touches him on the forehead, and then the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t understand why she is so forgiving; he doesn’t understand how he can be gone for so long with no explanation and all she does is offer him that sweet smile and shy voice. There are so many reasons she shouldn’t have any kind of faith in him, and yet somehow, she does.
He is quiet for a long moment, but in that stretch of silence, he pulls her in. He drapes his head over her neck, knowing that she will curl into him as she has before. His lips trail along the arch of her neck, through the strands of her mane, and the slope of her shoulder. They brush across the wounded skin and over the armor of bone, and he pays no attention to the way her blood sticks to his sterling coat in places. He simply breathes her in, filling himself with her familiar scent of metallic copper mingled with the sea.
She had asked him to stay, and he knows he should promise her that he will. It would be the right answer, but it also still feels like something he can’t keep. There are so many things that he is — cold, distant, closed — but he doesn’t ever want to be the one that tells her something and then doesn’t keep his word.
Finally, with his mouth pressed against her neck, and then again caressing closer to her ear, he utters quietly, “You deserve so much better than anything I can offer you.” He clenches his jaw against that feeling that once more begins to well inside of him, rising like a wave that threatens to drown his ability to reason. Her smell, the feel of her curves against his, and the glitter of her sea-green eyes, they all have a way of working in sync to methodically work away at what little willpower he had. “But it doesn’t keep me from wanting you,” he says in the grit of his voice, pushing closer and holding her tighter all at once.
— and I'll make you remember my face —
