quiet like a fight

DEIMOS Delivered from the blasts Silence, he received only silence in return for the seams he’d tried to stitch together, and he wondered if he should’ve just stayed in those hushed platitudes, the comfortable, familiar hole of hushed observations and quiet contemplations. They didn’t seem to matter, or bear any weight, and the notions curved against him, like knives, like daggers, and he wondered if it was possible to become hollow again. Maybe he was useless. Maybe she didn’t need him. Maybe they were too broken and splintered, fractured against every single blasted onslaught flung their direction, and it’d just been too many assaults, too many blows. Maybe she believed he was incapable – maybe she was right. But there’d always been those convictions stored within him, unsung pledges and abhorrent vows, streamlines of machinations and ruses meant to protect those he cherished. He’d utilized them once before, became their weapon, their munitions, their blackguard in the shadows, embracing every ounce of every sin, iniquitous and primordial, a breathing blade, an immoral vessel, weapon, weapon, weapon. Perhaps he wasn’t meant for comfort, perhaps he didn’t have a clue what to do when everything around him started to crumble (flee or fight – sometimes he buried his soul in the sands and waited for the world to smother him whole, sometimes he took up arms and drove his cutlass into the heart of the nearest man). Perhaps she understood that, and merely waited for the inevitable: his failures, his defeats, his head lowered into the dark, tossed against the barrage of rocks and the crag rising from the sea. He listened though, because in those garbled, strangled moments that was all he could do – as he brooded, as he seethed, as he returned to glacial king, sovereign of the mountains sitting upon his throne with gallows in his sights and irreverence on his skin; looking down at the brush of fur on his arm, a shift from baker to predator. He bit back a retort, a snort, was slightly gratified in that her trembling had ceased, but the subjects drifted away – pondering if she was avoiding everything, if she didn’t want to answer his inquiries, if she thought him incapable. A measure of ire and abhorrence clawed its way back into his flesh again, pulsing, pervading at his veins – horrible at assuaging, at soothing, when naught he did held any significance, any consequence, except specks of dust, ash, and cinders. One hand went to an ear, scratching behind it, then ghosting to the puff of whiskers at her cheek, incapable of smothering the sigh shuddering through his chest. “What do you want me to do?” She hoped he could hear the refusal in standing down, the tone of tenacity, of endurance, of fortitude, action in the eloquence, so many more things he could say by ambitions and aspirations alone. Let me do something. He’d burn the world. He’d stab the Merciless through the heart. He’d defend and slay and perish. For her. The depth of his gaze flickered away from her, piercing and penetrating, deep insurrection, staring into the shadows crawling along the walls, baritone fixed and rooted. “Because I refuse to do nothing.” the last of a line of lasts