He pulls her from the mire and to his warm and beating chest with ease, and she seeks his warmth like a cavern-blind refugee. Even the hearth's radiance cannot sway her from the darkness she seeks from the force of pressing her face into his form. His scent fills her nose, and in this chosen darkness she hides fearfully from the other, heavier one that prowls covetously around the protective light Deimos enshrouds her in. Like a starving wolf circling the light of a campfire.
Hotaru folds like a child into his embrace. Nobody else would ever be granted the ability to see this, to see her this way. Flora, Talyson, Sah...for all she loves them, Hotaru could never entrust these broken shards to their hands. Not like she can with Deimos.
"What do you need?"
There are no empty platitudes or comforts. No expectations. Only support, a back that has never left hers since the day they first pressed them together.
That's when the tears finally come.
They tear from her like metal burrs being forcefully pulled from her veins, leaving her bleeding out and burning. Fingers claw and twist into his shirt as her entire body curls tighter inward, until her knees nearly touch the shattered thing that lives beneath her sternum where a heart once beat. Wounded sounds filter through between muffled, screaming sobs. It's a violent onslaught of every strapped down, stifled, compartmentalized emotion that has been building since she saw her son dead in the street.
A phoenix's rebirth is so often seen as a thing of beauty, a gift; and yet they must throw themselves onto a pyre built from the element that once healed and sustained them, must suffer through the dissolution of every atom of their being before they can breathe again. And so Hotaru burns. Deimos' hands, as native to the wielding of fire as human forms could ever achieve, are the only vessel she could trust to keep her whole as she does. Any words of response are lost to the flames as she screams and burns and dies there in his arms, as real a death as Ludo could ever dream to deliver to her.
Hotaru folds like a child into his embrace. Nobody else would ever be granted the ability to see this, to see her this way. Flora, Talyson, Sah...for all she loves them, Hotaru could never entrust these broken shards to their hands. Not like she can with Deimos.
"What do you need?"
There are no empty platitudes or comforts. No expectations. Only support, a back that has never left hers since the day they first pressed them together.
That's when the tears finally come.
They tear from her like metal burrs being forcefully pulled from her veins, leaving her bleeding out and burning. Fingers claw and twist into his shirt as her entire body curls tighter inward, until her knees nearly touch the shattered thing that lives beneath her sternum where a heart once beat. Wounded sounds filter through between muffled, screaming sobs. It's a violent onslaught of every strapped down, stifled, compartmentalized emotion that has been building since she saw her son dead in the street.
A phoenix's rebirth is so often seen as a thing of beauty, a gift; and yet they must throw themselves onto a pyre built from the element that once healed and sustained them, must suffer through the dissolution of every atom of their being before they can breathe again. And so Hotaru burns. Deimos' hands, as native to the wielding of fire as human forms could ever achieve, are the only vessel she could trust to keep her whole as she does. Any words of response are lost to the flames as she screams and burns and dies there in his arms, as real a death as Ludo could ever dream to deliver to her.
Feel the fear and swallow back the tears
Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
Let weakness disappear, there's nobody but me here
