resurrection tastes like iron

felled in the night by the ones you think you love

they will come for you

She laughs, laughs – and the sound is like chime-like bells to his ears, his steeled eyes drifting back to her, as the woman’s home hits her lips – a raised eyebrow, and she mentions something that relieves all the previous tension he feels momentarily as his eyes linger on her and her lips just a bit longer than before. “What a pity that would have been.” His voice is rough, husky momentarily, until she repeats his own spitted words – like a viper. She knows how important Saar had been to him, how important they both had been.

He nods to her in response, Graasvoel. They had been friends with Gaal’s half-brother, had ran some rings with him once before, and Sunjata finds a moment where he misses the taste of the cigarettes the man would roll under the light of the street lamps. But he pushes the thought aside, eyes lingering on her as her hands meet his chest. Eyes alight with steel and a sharpness that she can tame. And her fingers, those dangerous hands he had kissed over and over again – a memory, the burn from a barrel of a gun, a curse, a tease, solved with a kiss. They find their way onto him, resting easily but finding their places, as though in the few years since he had seen her, the amount of training and work he had put into himself and running away had always left the perfect imprint for her.

But as he ends his story, a feral delight crosses Lusea’s face, one that he finds relieving amongst the events of the night. And he steps closer to her, her hands running over his cheekbones, caressing the sharp reddened skin on the one side, a purple bruise beginning to form beneath it. But he doesn’t mind, he’s never minded. And where once he had remained cleanshaven, he no longer is. A more rugged look, but still the same him, just with a bit more tension, a bit more muscle. The tattoos she seeks out, adjusted from whence she last saw them. His scars a bit more vibrant – no longer does his neck seep with a nonfatal cut to his neck, but it is scarred beneath her fingers, a long scar from the top of his ear that snakes down under his shirt.

For her. Like his adjusted tattoos.

The inked wings are there, but a compass is placed on the top of his shoulder, an arrow forever pointing the same direction, the direction he had picked for her, done in Dorobi. It was the least he thought he could do. And he nearly, so nearly comes undone at her praise, the fan to his flame, the rainstorms to his floods. She had always been his flame, and he had always been her flood. And yet wherever they met, whoever crossed them, had hell to pay.

His hands find her again, and he realizes shortly after he can’t stop himself from the drug she is to him. One hand snakes to her lower back, head tilting as his other hand reaches to cup her cheek, his thumb resting on her chin as he angles her head and searches her flint gaze. “I did it all for you.” He tells her, quiet, rough, a brutal sentence in their native tongue, guttural despite the bright smile that crosses his lips.

His fingers tangle in her hair, and he pulls her to him finally – his missing puzzle piece. “Let’s just say the Arbiter shouldn’t need to worry about successors any longer, your father made sure of that.” He hums thoughtfully before he angles his head down and presses his nose gently against her, breathing her in – the salt, the smoke, the iron, and how much he craves her. And he gives in, despite the blood that still traces his lower lip, pressing his lips to hers with the ferocity of his name's translation, a hungry lion.

SUNJATA