// standing, stomping in the damage and the ruins of a slip of tongue //
“Snapping.” Comes the blunt response, all poise and proper tones falling away in his exhaustion and tension, muscles feathering in his jaw as he tries to formulate words that haven’t even crossed his mind just yet. Thankfully, he isn’t a teeth grinder, intending on keeping his own teeth as sharp as can be, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t clench his jaw when everything happens.
He doesn’t know what will help, doesn’t know whether or not he should just retreat back to his room, but the warmth of Danta at his back and the nose in his hair like a shield against lingering inky wings in the recesses of his mind puts him at ease enough, curling in on himself to hide his chest all the same, like with the two of them combined he might be less vulnerable. Something he hates the idea of – the vulnerability – but cannot escape.
Letting the Maverick take his hand, Astaroth tries to take a deep breath, exhaling slowly through his nose, squeezing the other man’s hand back. He does as instructed, listens to the crackle of dry, burning wood, the sounds of chatter and clinking glasses outside the door, but there is no sound of swooping wings and no horribly croaked out comments of meat and eyes. “I don’t know what happened. I was doing fine.” He says as if that’s the crux of the issue – feeling fine, having even touched Moira, and yet his subconscious reaches the deep recesses of his mind, drawing back the trauma first and foremost, perhaps from when he’d tried to ward away the gore crows day after day.
He doesn’t know what will help, doesn’t know whether or not he should just retreat back to his room, but the warmth of Danta at his back and the nose in his hair like a shield against lingering inky wings in the recesses of his mind puts him at ease enough, curling in on himself to hide his chest all the same, like with the two of them combined he might be less vulnerable. Something he hates the idea of – the vulnerability – but cannot escape.
Letting the Maverick take his hand, Astaroth tries to take a deep breath, exhaling slowly through his nose, squeezing the other man’s hand back. He does as instructed, listens to the crackle of dry, burning wood, the sounds of chatter and clinking glasses outside the door, but there is no sound of swooping wings and no horribly croaked out comments of meat and eyes. “I don’t know what happened. I was doing fine.” He says as if that’s the crux of the issue – feeling fine, having even touched Moira, and yet his subconscious reaches the deep recesses of his mind, drawing back the trauma first and foremost, perhaps from when he’d tried to ward away the gore crows day after day.
Astaroth
// with tragic consequences, i think that we've all made our gravest mistakes //
