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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    [private]  the sound of your voice in the aching
    #11

    DESPOINA

    She doesn’t speak as he tells her the story—doesn’t dare interrupt or even make a sound as he unfurls everything that lives within his heart to tell her what had happened. There are pieces of her that break in the retelling. Vital pieces of her that crumble to dust as he expounds on what it had been like to live and then die, what it had been like to hear such horrible things told to him, even if it was from phantom lips.

    It is so similar to what she has experienced, that hurt hurled her way, and every angry word she has spoken to him rings in her ears. It echoes in the empty hollows of her chest and she feels a deep sense of shame spear through her. A weight along her shoulders for ever adding onto the sorrows of his life. For being one more person to lash out at him and say the worst of him—except hers were no phantom lips.

    But she doesn’t dredge up such self-pity or self-loathing.

    She just watches him.

    When he confesses that he needs negative emotions to survive, she finally breaks that silence with a sharp inhale, her darkened eyes widening in surprise. And all of a sudden, it all makes so much sense. Everything clicks into place and something like peace, as broken and treacherous as it is, settles in her, soothes her twisted heart. She doesn’t hesitate to close the distance between them, folding herself amongst the shadows of him—and later she might wonder at the bravery, the brashness of such an action.

    But for now, it just feels right. She forgets her anger and her hurt. She just focuses instead on the feeling of him being near her, that intoxicating sensation of being surrounded by the spice of him. Quietly, she presses iridescent lips to the slope of his shoulder and then his chest where she knows his heart still beat.

    “You won’t starve,” she promises, her voice steady and cool. Determined. Because she has never had anything to even pretend to call her own—and she won’t lose him, regardless of what he has said. What he has done. “And I won’t be hurt so long as I know what is happening.” This is a lie, she thinks, because the idea of him touching or being near another still twists her stomach. “We’ll find where you can feed.”

    She glances up, steel in her eye, “I can help.”

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #12
    YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED
    FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR

    He is surprised when she steps forward. When the warmth of her body is suddenly curled against his cool shadows, and he almost feels guilty for how easily he caves into her. Her lips brush against his chest, right where his heart—the only real piece of him that remains at all—beats erratically, and she again incites that war that is always a breath away from raging inside of him. The part of him that knows exactly how to love her, always locked in battle with this new, feral part of him that only wanted to take exactly what it needed to survive.

    He almost wonders if it’s worse, to have the ability to recognize all the things he does wrong, but to not have the means to control it. Like watching himself destroy her from the outside looking in, and no way to stop it.

    But he can’t help himself, because the moment she touches him, hardly a second passes before he is returning it. Before he is draping his neck over hers and pulling her in tighter, burying his face in her dark hair and closing his eyes against the feeling of his chest trying to split apart. “Nothing else is going to happen,” he whispers fervently into her skin, trailing his lips along her neck. “I can’t lose you, and I know that I’m going to if I don’t stop,” there is an urgency to his voice, low and hushed as it is, and he can feel his heart squeezing again inside of his chest. “I never want anything bad to ever happen to you, but I am the bad.”

    It is only when she offers to help that he goes still and quiet, and though she can’t see it, there is a quiet kind of darkness that settles on his face. He can’t stand the thought of her seeing him like that. Can’t stomach the idea of her watching him prey on anyone that he can find, or the way he toys with their emotions to make them afraid when he is feeling desperate.

    And he realizes that there could never be any truth to what he had just told her moments before.
    He was always meant to lose her, because no matter how hard they loved each other, he was impossible to change.

    Eventually, he steps back, shaking his head slowly. His jaw tightens and clenches, his eyes closed as he tries to work up the nerve to say what he knows needs to be said. “I will never let you go, Despoina,” there is a growl somewhere in his chest, in the back of his throat, because he hates the truth of what he is about to say. “The only way you will ever be happy is if you leave, but I will never be the one to release you.” Finally he turns his red eyes back to her face, bright and burning, matching the fire-like pain in his chest. “There is no fixing this—fixing me. But without me in your life I promise, you will learn to be just fine.”
    T O R R Y N
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    #13

    DESPOINA

    She has never been embraced like the way that he embraces her. Never felt something so all-encompassing. Something so complete and she knows that there is not a single thing she would not do to protect it. She would tear herself apart—but that was easy. It was a simple thing for her to promise because she did not cherish herself. Did not set herself apart as something to guard. But for him? She would tear others apart. She would attack the innocent and burn down kingdoms. She would become the monster that she knows lives beneath her skin. The thing she still holds back on a leash.

    If he needed pain and sorrow and hate to survive, then she would incite it.

    And would damn herself to hell for it.

    At his whisper, she shakes her head, shivering beneath his touch—that thing that still feels so new and so precious. “You won’t lose me,” and her voice is fierce. Determined. “You’re mine,” is all she says, not bothering to counteract whether he was bad or not. Because that didn’t matter to her. She did not care whether he was terrible or angelic—because he was hers. He was the only thing in this world that had ever been hers. Shy, she kisses the slope of his shadowed shoulder. “You’re mine, Torryn.”

    He pulls back and the space between them is a yawning chasm, bitterly cold, and she shivers again, but this time from the distance and not the pleasure of him. “I won’t leave,” she says with a stubborn lift of her chin, finding the first thing in her life worth fighting for. Worth digging in her heels for. “I have never wanted to be happy,” she says and perhaps it is a lie, but it feels like the truth in this moment.

    “There is no happiness if I leave you,” her black eyes sharpen. “You would condemn me to a life of longing. A life of wishing.” She wants to close the distance between them but despite the spine that she has shown in these moments, she is still Despoina and there is not enough confidence to assume that he would accept her, that he would not just step away again. So she holds herself separate.

    “Let me help you.”

    Her voice waivers and there is a rush of agony through her as she imagines what she stands to lose. She lifts her chin again, her heart pounding in her chest. “You say you need negative emotions to survive,” she swallows, “so then you must feel them off of me. You must know what I’m feeling now.” The hurt from his indiscretions. The despair at the thought that she may lose him. The self-loathing for her anger.

    “Feed, Torryn.”

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #14
    YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED
    FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR

    “I am yours,” he confirms with his mouth again brushing along her neck, but saying the words twists the knife deeper into his gut. He cannot imagine a crueler fate than the one he has been dealt—to be cursed to love someone who is full of all the horrible things that he craves. To both simultaneously be drawn to her because she is brimming with sorrow but also wishing she never felt such things.

    It makes him stare at her with a vulnerable kind of brokenness that so rarely managed to make it beyond the harsh red glare, a glimmer of the normal boy that had died for his family breaking through.

    The boy that wants to break apart at hearing her say she never wanted to be happy, because he knows it is a lie.
    The boy that knows all too well what a normal love looks like, and recognizes that he will never be able to give it to her.

    He doesn’t say anything though, only closes his eyes against it. He does not argue with her, does not tell her that choosing to stay with him will condemn her to a lifetime of despair and heartbreak, which had to be worse than longing and wishing. The longing would go away eventually, he is sure of it. She would find someone else to fill up the space he left, which he doesn’t think would be hard, given all he is is just shadow and bone.

    His glowing eyes snap back to hers when she offers her help, with such a sudden surge of agony that he tastes it again on his tongue. He shakes his head, a definitive no already prepared, but then she tells him that he must feel it—that he must feel all of the things that radiate from her, and he goes quiet. There, in the silence that stretches between them, he remembers the first time he met her. How even then she had been saturated in sorrow, that it filled her until it poured over. How almost immediately it sparked a fire in both parts of him; how he had thought himself lucky to find her when she was full of exactly what he needed, but also recognizing how twisted that was, to want someone to be broken.

    “I know,” the two words are quiet and taut with unspoken emotions, wondering if he could ever even begin to explain it all to her. If he could ever possibly untangle how much she causes him to fight with himself, how it is a daily battle to not consume her. “I felt it all from the moment I met you, and it was why I stayed away from you at first.” He watches her carefully, searching her pretty face, afraid of how that honesty will injure her even though he had only done it to protect her. “The thought of using you for that has always been unbearable.”

    He has stepped forward again now, still holding her gaze. In a painfully slow motion he reaches for her, gently brushing her forelock away from her face, and then letting his lips trail from her temple and following the curve to her throat. He lingers there, feeling her pulse beneath his touch, bright eyes closed as he rests his forehead against her neck.

    It feels like hours that he waits there, debating, fighting, turning over the consequences in his mind.

    When he does, at last, begin to slowly drain it from her he does it with his mouth caressing gently along her neck, her shoulder, the top of her back, as if that somehow will make it okay. He does not know what it feels like, has never really paid attention to how they react, though he has always been methodic and merciful. He does not think it hurts, because he has learned that he can drain them while staring them in the eye, and all that is there is a sudden emptiness, and that look of realization just before he disappears because they know he took something from them.

    But he is all the more careful with her, mindful of what it does to her, and he cannot bring himself to take it all. He stops when his own sorrow and regret becomes too much, the guilt nearly overpowering as he suddenly rests his head against her side, right where he can hear her heartbeat inside of her ribs. “I’m sorry, Des,”  his voice is quiet and hoarse with the shadows and the tangle of emotions he is grappling with, his breathing nearly ragged with remorse. “I’m sorry.”
    T O R R Y N


    @despoina
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    #15

    DESPOINA

    Despoina doesn’t know what a normal love looks like, not like him. She barely knows the outline of a faux love. Even her time spent with the family of skeletons and shifters was cut short and colored by her own insecurity, her own pain, her own jealousy. So she never took the time to truly study them together and pick up what it meant to love another heart so completely. To be able to feel that kind of love.

    This is the closest she has ever gotten.

    The truest it has ever felt.

    She knows that this is something precious to her. Something pure that she would kill for. It’s not anything that she thinks outright, but it’s a truth that is buried in her very bones. She knows that she would kill for him without blinking. Would slaughter others without losing a moment of sleep. There is no line that she would not cross, no manner of sacrificing her soul that she would not commit for him.

    So she doesn’t balk when he tells her that he knows how she feels and his concern for using her in such a banner. She shakes her head. “You’re not taking something that I am not freely giving,” she murmurs and lifts her head for him to further expose her throat, feeling her heart pounding there, pulse ringing in her ears. It takes a moment for it to take hold. Takes a moment before she feels it snag against her like a hook and her breath escapes her in a violent whoosh. She trembles and leans against him, eyes closing as she feels that sensation winding through her—something familiar and not, something deep and aching.

    It hurts, but in a different way than she is used to. It drains the negative emotions and yet she does not feel them leave her. If anything, they are amplified in her breast. They pound against the back of her eyes. Wave after wave of everything he consumes pours through her. The fear. The sorrow. The self-loathing. The anxiety. It all comes crashing down and she does her best to simply ride through it. To breathe.

    Hours pass, or perhaps it is merely her perception of time, and when he is done, she remains still for several moments longer. She keeps her eyes closed and leans against him, cheek to his shoulder, her body covered in a thin sheen of sweat. When he speaks, she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, as if in confirmation that she heard him, and she fights for the surface—fights to gain control once more.

    Her eyes flutter open and they find his, and she offers a weak smile.

    “The second time will be easier.”

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #16
    YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED
    FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR

    In the wake of his satisfaction he feels nothing but shame.

    Once the pangs of hunger have subsided and he is able to see her clearly through the fog, is able to feel the way she weakly rests against him and how her skin is damp with sweat, the guilt is brought into sharp relief. He reaches for her, twisting until his shadowed neck is draped over hers and he can pull her closer to him, as if having her closer will somehow lessen the pain that has driven like a blade into his chest. He wants to correct her and tell her that there will not be a second time; he wants to argue until she relents and accepts that she will not be his sacrifice, because he will not allow it.

    If anything, this had cemented it, but he did not want her to try and fight with him now.

    Instead all he does is press his mouth to the top of her neck, gently dragging his lips down her damp skin and along the curve of her cheek. “Maybe,” he manages a noncommittal answer for her, hoping the uncertainty he feels does not leak into his voice. For a moment his red eyes close, focusing only on the steadfast rhythm of her heartbeat, before finally murmuring gently into her dark mane, “You should rest. I promise I’ll be right here.” A promise that he intends to keep, for as long as she will let him.
    T O R R Y N


    an extremely late closer lmao
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