I was a poor boy; you were a bright light
I was a sinner and you were a snake
Their encounter had been so brief, but he had never forgotten.
Perhaps because she more than any had seen the wretched boy that he was beneath it all. Because she had been able to slip that poisonous knife between his ribs and how he had hated it because he had known that it was exactly what he had deserved. He could have died falling on that sword and bled out and it would have been exactly the ending that he needed—exactly the way that it should have always gone.
Except he had walked away relatively unscathed and been forced to live with himself every day.
He had gone on to cause more pain, more damage (and brought children into the world for god's sake), and there is no small part of him that blames her for letting it happen. She should have killed him like he knows that she wanted to. She should have been the one to end it all. She’s the only one who saw.
The only one who really knew just how terrible he was.
But she hadn’t and it takes a second for him to recognize her now that she walks up to him now. Her body now a living, breathing reminder of that which she has always been—untouchable, unfathomable. His chest aches with it when she speaks and her name clicks into place, making its way out before he can stop it. “Brinly,” he breathes, throat tightening with emotions he can’t name, can’t contain.
“Long enough for you to set yourself on fire,” he notes, nodding toward the summer that coats her and brightens her eyes—a dangerous kind of beauty, he thinks, before he banishes the thought entirely.
“Have you finally come to give me the end I deserve?” his voice sounds rough with disuse, the words difficult to form and barely unpeeling from his swollen tongue. “Or are you just passing through?”
shook like some old souls when our bones broke
swallowed the sickness, a fever, a flame
@Brinly