[private] the kind of heartbreak time could never mend, atrox

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

He has been patient, he thinks. As patient as he knows how. Patience that has been steeped in a rare kind of anger. Anger that she had been punished for trying to help while he had stayed home and suffered no wounds. That she had been the one to charge into the fray and he could only watch helplessly in the aftermath. He feels useless. Furious. He wants to rage at the gods. At the faeries. At Beqanna herself.

And he does.

He slips from her, shifting into panther form with two specters that haunt his steps. He hunts until his belly is full and he just slaughters with no intention of eating his fill. He leaves carcasses littered around Hyaline with marks of his fury on their throats. He rips and tears and shreds. Roaring as he realizes again and again that he should be the one. He should be the one with the war wounds. Not her. Never her.

But he comes back gentler, for her. He lies as near to her as possible and soothes himself with her presence, even if that presence cannot be physically felt. It is enough, he thinks, which is a novelty in some ways. Novel that he would choose to spend a year with her without being able to touch her.

And though it does not bite back his anger, his guilt, his impatience, he learns new things.

Learns what it is like to live with someone and be sated by their laughter, or their quiet looks, or their observations when shared. Things he had always appreciated more but somehow has come to appreciate even more when the rest was stripped away. He falls in love again. In new ways. Deeper ways.

So when she comes to him, nearly blinding, he blinks in surprise and then bellows in joy as he catapults to her. She is hesitant but he is not. He is unleashed as he rushes to her, as he pulls her close, his throat thick at the satin of her underneath his lips. “Ryatah,” is all he can manage as he crushes her to his scarred, empty chest. He barely notices the other changes—the brightness of her. The stardust.

All he sees is her.

All he ever sees is her.

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING