quiet like a fight

DEIMOS Delivered from the blasts Not long before, this Spartan expanse had housed comfort and ease, relaxation and repose, a sanctuary he’d carved for himself, for her, with naught attached but some semblance of peace and serenity. Now though, by the way she sat, by the letter clutched in her hand, by the way she’d breezed through the door, by the way silence had spun itself back into the domicile, like ice, like a chill, the tranquility was gone. In its place sauntered trepidation and misgivings, and he’d had enough of them to last him two lifetimes – fallen comrades, dead allies, lost brethren, shadows chased and disappeared, buried friends, deceased family, and then the crossing of wires on his kin here, over and over and over again – a record no one wanted to hear. He hid the sigh tucked in his chest, letting it out as he stewed and brooded around his counter top and cabinets, pulling down a couple mugs, thinking to fill them with one of her favored teas (though he’d really prefer some sort of alcohol; the pending intentions lacquered around these frameworks weren’t going to be good – he could tell just by the look on her face). While he put a kettle of water on the stove, waiting for it to heat up and boil, he threaded his way along the table, before finally sitting down in a chair beside her. It was so ominous that he felt ill; a noxious bile coiling itself around his throat, into his stomach, flickering out on his bated breath. One of his hands reached for hers, while the other ghosted over the parchment, pulling it closer so that he could read its contents. The more his eyes roamed over the lines, the arch of script, the context, the more his grasp became a tauter, more rigid consternation; a blistering, ferocious rage began to fill the spaces of consternation, apprehension, and disquiet. They no longer existed in the state of his fury, a contempt brutally unraveling its way in ridges along his ribs, pulsing with the beat of his primordial, annihilating heart. It’d been a long time since he’d loathed anyone so foul, so outrageous, so despicable, but he certainly remembered how. The state of his features were cold and menacing, a rapacious chill conforming to his brows – the ice king again, the Siberian soldier, hastened off to chase down those that threatened his own. In Helovia, he’d been capable of calling them out on their own front steps, brutalizing, savaging, ripping them apart the way they’d intended to do to his people. In Isilme, he’d cut them down where they stood because otherwise they’d have done the same to him or any of his colleagues. In Caido, the Queen, the enemy, sat behind mansions and guards, waiting for one of them to come sidling her way, a snake in the grass, hoping to make the right strike. She’d already done it with Rexanna. She wasn’t getting to Amalia. “You are welcome to stay here,” he managed to utter through clenched teeth and jaw; tossing the paper onto the table, where it fluttered and sat, wishing he could burn it, releasing her only so that he could survey his weapons nearby, his options, calculating, machinating, pondering how he would get to her without losing bits and pieces of his own flesh first. the last of a line of lasts