resurrection tastes like iron

felled in the night by the ones you think you love

they will come for you

“My storm.” She growls to him, and a positively wicked smirk crosses his face in response to her wild grin. His lips and teeth meet her bronze skin, and her fingernails scrape against the tattooed skin of his back and a growl leaves him at the feel of the welts rising. There’s goosebumps that rise on his skin, but he tempers himself — tempers himself like he has many times before to pull away and let her remove her shift.

His eyes linger as she stays there, pinned by him against the wall, looking over the marks he had seen them give her and yet it does nothing to remove the regret he feels deep down. The only one fully visible before, the fatal one, but now? Now he can see the circular burns, the lingering of the whips peeking and cresting above her shoulders. He had done this, not by the hand, but by the association. And he realizes shortly that he’s proud to have burned the fucking place to the ground.

But his eyes still roam, mimicking her as calloused fingertips trace her scars, drifting from her thigh to her chest — slow and teasing, testing, waiting for her to grow bored of his lingering. But his fingertips slip from her stomach, caressing and careful while his steel eyes follow the tiptoe of his fingers until he reaches the burns, sliding up to her collarbones, and then her neck. “I am sorry, my flame.” He tells her a small amount mournfully. But he chooses to show her just how sorry he is in other ways.

She tells him to show her, and his fingers still momentarily on her jaw, lifting it up to look into her stormy flint eyes, recalling a similar look late at night, drenched in the downpour, when he had finally gotten her to say yes. Only this time, he has no bloody knuckles, no bruising to his chest, not enough body heat to steam the sweat and rain from his tattooed skin. He had looked a storm, smoke and rain and blood and destruction, a cigarette hanging from his lips, and she had looked like hell — and gods how he fell for her.

He was gone, in that instant. The pining, the waiting, the game she played — and he had thought he had been the master of them. But then he met her, and she gave him a run for his money, a run for his life, the ability to drop what he was bred and raised to be for the opposite. He had taken it for her. Done everything for her. Would have died for her, if he could have. And yet she had been the one to pay the price, his anarchy queen who would howl from the rooftops with a gun in her hand, hair tied back, blood and smoke an inherent war paint streaked along her face.

He holds her close, pressing into her, eyes shuddering every time she touches him — he can take her there, but he knows he wants to draw it out, to relish in the blankets and pillows and the sheer softness of them compared to the scratchy fabric from home. She deserves it, after all, and he braces her against him to hold her tight, carrying her over to the nearest bed, and laying her down upon it. He presses a kiss to her lips, hungry with need and want, but the feeling of him restraining himself are there. His kisses delve lower, to her chin, to her neck where he kisses every inch of the scar with gentle tenderness much unlike him, until he drifts lower from it to her collarbones where he gets more rough — claiming, claiming, claiming again and again.

Arms are braced on either side of her head, fingers trailing and tangling into her long hair, waiting for her to demand, to tell him as she always did that he takes too long. But he can’t help it if he wants to devour her more, savoring, loving. He slips down from her further, arms sliding with him as his hands reach for her chest to play and tease as he swoops dragging kisses and claiming marks lower and lower — and agonizingly slowly begins to show her.

SUNJATA