quiet like a fight

DEIMOS Delivered from the blasts He didn’t have a leopard skin to wear – his armor was his own, fortified along shoals and battlefields, flesh forged into chainmail, walls inclining up and over his features, the stoic, the nonchalant, the viciously, visibly detached. It was a way to persist without constant agony. It was a way to endure without consistent anguish. It was a way he could remain upon this earth without falling horrifically apart; a broken, whittled shell of a man, reassembled only by bits and pieces, by shards and fragments. He wanted to retreat into that sanction, that sanctuary, that haven he’d built for himself for what felt like lifetimes ago; a shelter against the storm so he didn’t fail her, so he didn’t disappoint her. But he was so damned lost, so damned hopeless, so utterly damned that everything scraped down his throat and choked him down, suffocating, smothering, drowning him from the inside out. The beast had hope and affection now, and in its stead he was momentarily trapped in the snares of his past, yearning to bleed into those primeval, primordial refuges of warriors and refugees, tucked away from the brutality of the world so he could think, so he could muse, so he could compose something worthy of her, worthy of this, worthy of them. Maybe he pushed too much. Maybe, because they’d suffered so many other things, because they’d managed and obtained survival even amidst darker intonations and incantations, he thought it simply be another hurdle to launch over, another line to cross. Was this deeper – fathoms he couldn’t see within, depths he couldn’t burn his way out of? Or were these alterations of the same old nuances; differing calculations and notions, but the sentiments the same? She purred instead of trembled, instead of shaking, and he took it, threading all his notions into a scathing silence, yearning to rip things into splinters and remnants; but rendering this, here and now. His hand followed the same ritual, scratching over fur and proffering some form of comfort (but it was too new and he was too stupid and it simply, couldn’t possibly be, enough). She shifted though, back to human form, tail and ears remaining, an incomplete transition that might’ve leant her more ease than he could – then her fingers skimmed over his cheek, and the quivering seemed to return. He glanced down, and he had no idea what his eyes portrayed: a mixture of frustration and affection, hopelessness and strength? The warrens were wide and the labyrinths were massive, overwhelming, overbearing, but he shifted his other hand to her cheek, gently placing her head in between the junction of his shoulder and neck; then curling his arms back around her, a tight embrace, a shield in the storm. “They will not have you,” he whispered into the dark, into her ear, into her cheek, into her skin, while her tears flowed and the nefarious reaches of his heart pulsed. His chest hurt. His lungs seized. And somewhere, the promise, the conviction, was laden against his soul; another vow he intended to keep. the last of a line of lasts