I never knew daylight could be so violent
May. 6th, 2016 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furgoodHer name rings out over the crowd but she doesn't hear it. Pairs of wide eyes turn to stare and she stares blankly and uncertainly back. Finally, someone nudges her and mouth 'Go' and she finally understands
It's a jumble. The crowd before her, the way her sister puts that pearl strung on cord in her hands, the way Latula tries to get her eyes to stay on her, her mother and father in tears. She's going to die out there and no one can save her.
There's a whole group of mentors for her. At seventeen, she should stand a chance, but everyone knows she doesn't. She sees it in Derek's eyes, in Chuck's restless hands. Finnick explains things slowly, Annie doesn't speak much at all. Mag is the one there at night, who doesn't speak to her but offers comfort. It's useless right? A deaf girl can't win the games.
So why don't they give up?
-
She builds nets the size of small ships in training. She throws spears that clatter to the ground when she's tested and she looks hopeless but a real person would have been taken to the ground. She smiles bright and wide for the crowd and lets all her chattering come through, even if the questions have to be written down. She waves in delight to the crowd in a sheer thing decked in pearls and brilliant with shimmering scales. She's charming and sweet but sweet never won the games.
Her confidence, small and uncertain as it is, shatters utterly in the confines of the arena. It's desert far as the eye can see, shifting sands that blind and precious water stacked in the cornucopia. She can't take the chance. She can't survive without it. Everyone told her to turn and leave but would she survive a day without it?
The single bottle she snags is just as precious as the spear. The bottle is shoved roughly down her shirt as she runs. The spear is held loosely at her side. She doesn't think she's followed out into the sand but who knows? They could be out of sight. They could be right behind her. She doesn't think about it. She's such an expert at not thinking about it.
Her first night is cold and sudden. The jacket that had been wrapped around her waist hours ago is pulled back on. Her hands wrap tight around the spear as she watches the sky light up with faces. Somewhere the Capitol is watching as she smiles. Not dead yet.
She hasn't given up.
-
The days blur into each other as her water runs low. Desperation drives her on. A smudge of water on the horizon has her going for hours before she suddenly remember the way a haze of land on an open sea can fool a person into going miles off course. The sun beats down on her as her knees hit the sand. She wants to cry.
That night she carves the quills off a cactus, just to see what's within. The inside of the plant glistens in the moonlight, wet. She doesn't cry. Salty tears that will never be pool in her eyes but don't fall. The spines prick at her fingertips as she carves off strips and sucks them dry. Perhaps in the real world, this would dangerous to trust the plant. In the arena, there had to be water. There had to be life. No one wanted to watch a girl die of thirst. Slowly, she feels strength return to her. The morning finds her braiding the spines into her hair, wrapping a few around the other end of her spear. It saved her. It deserves to be put to use.
Maybe she could stay here. Maybe she could just live off the cactus until the rest kill themselves off. It's a foolish hope. No one would want to watch a girl suck the water from a cactus and eat nothing at all. She pulls up her knees to her chin and watches for the mean little scorpions that skitter across the sand.
-
A dark smudge blots the horizon. Meulin watches it. It's bigger now. It's bigger and bigger. Sand is skittering around now, vibrating and moving. Her ears that hear almost nothing can hear the dull dull roar. She launches to her feet, turns, runs.
It catches up with her almost before she can take a full breath. There's sand in her mouth, in her hair. She squeezes her eyes shut, pulls her jacket over her face, and runs blind. The ground shifts under her, trying to trip her, but she's a District Four girl and she knows how to walk on the sand.
It ends as abruptly as it began. The wind stops and sand falls to the ground in sheets. Her jacket is flung off, spraying more sand into the air, and she shakes her hair to fling the stuff off. Her skin feels hot and rubbed raw, shiny pink and red along her knuckles, her cheeks, the insides of her shoes and around her ankles. The sun presses down, flares more heat into those raw wounds. It's alright. She looks around, spots another copse of cacti. Her shoulders drop, every inch of her feeling the relief.
She still has her spear.
Not at all of it is good news though. The land here might be flatter, the dunes punctuated by low stretches of flat land, but that makes her easier to see. It makes it easier to see them coming. She tries to think like a hunter but she's not made for it, not used to it. Her world is pen and paper. She tries anyways.
-
A shimmering dot falls from the night sky. A falling star. She traces its path, waiting for it to disappear, but it falls in a swinging slow motion, delayed, not a falling star at all. The little parachute blinks at her. Soft and insistent as it falls behind a dune merely two dunes away. So long without food, without real water, dulls her reaction. The world spins beneath her, slow and unstoppable. She watches. She realizes. She snaps to her feet. The dunes are hard to climb, wearing out legs already worn out, but she manages not to fall until she has the parachute in her grasp.
It's pulled open with brittle fingernails, breaking one on the stubborn clasp. It would bother her some other day. Now she has treasures, she has food. Bread flecked with green seaweed. Two fish, recently fried, still warm. And the most treasured thing, a bottle of pure clean water. Tears threaten but she pulls up her smile. She looks up, trying to find where a camera might be.
"Thank you. I can't possibly repay you."
She eats everything on those fish down to the eyes. Her bread is wrapped up the parachute. There was no note but she doesn't need it. The eyes of her family, of her District, are on her. She has to do better. She has to try.
She can't give up.
The parachute is big enough to knot in two places, big enough to carry a carefully despined piece of cactus in one side and the oh so precious bread and water in the other. She doesn't know where the Cornucopia is. Everything is a jumble in her head, impossible to sort out. She tries anyways.
-
Her first kill comes all too easily. It shouldn't be that easy to slide a spear into someone's gut, to pull it away and let viscera fly. It should be harder to kill someone. It isn't. The boy in front of her falls to the ground. She hadn't asked questions. She wasn't sweet. She wasn't kind. She wasn't charming or bubbly or excited. She was tired. She was lonely. She wanted to go home.
The next one is harder. They jump her, all too sudden, all too vicious. Her elbow hits their ribs, their knife grabs into her arm, pulls, grates against bone. The scream it pulls from her echoes inside her head. She doesn't remember exactly what happens. More slices to her arm, along her stomach and it threatens to spill her insides out, pink and red, for the world to see. She pulls away somehow. somehow she hefts the spear with her bleeding arm, squeezing the too big wound with the other. Somehow the spear reaches, it hits, it makes it. They fall. The girl--she suddenly realizes--falls. There's probably a sound. Something shivers in her, that cannon made physical in her bones.
Her jacket is tied tight around her stomach. The gash bleeds, not as deep as she thought, but she's nearly died once. This pain will pass. It will fade. It will end. She turns her back on the corpse and clenches her trembling hands around the solid spear.
She doesn't cry.
-
It feels like she's been months in this arena. The desert has sucked the life from her. Lips cracked, thin body pulling in tight on itself, blood caked into her clothing. Two times. She's killed twice. She licks her lips, trying to infuse some moisture into them. It only makes them feel drier. It must be the end, right? She's not sure how much longer she can go on, waiting for death to come. It surely must come for her.
Flashes of light make her look up. She watches a meteor shower streak the beautiful night sky. They're bright. So bright. Too bright. Her eyes widen. The first one hits the ground in the dunes. White hot sand pelts her, even three dunes away, burns into her arm, her shoulder, her back. She screams, curling around that much abused arm. The desert is burning. The sky is aflame, red and yellow and white. It burns, it melts, this desert that withstands such heat burns alive. She'll burn with it.
Death has come for her at last.
She doesn't want it.
The featureless desert gains landmarks, pits of molten glass, burning cacti. The meteors slam into the ground around her, throwing her off her feet, but still she runs. Her lungs protest, her arms, her legs. Everything is stretched and sore and pained. Everything wants to give up. She hits something, slams into it headfirst. It's metal, the first metal she's seen outside her spear in who knows how long. The days have twisted together. Has it been a week? A month? Has she always lived in this arena?
Still, being forced to the cornucopia can only mean one thing.
-
It takes two more minutes for the promised showdown. Usually they arrive right on time, together. Usually it's like that. This unusual lapse gives her time to breath, to cinch the piece of the jacket extra tight. It gives her time to think about what she's doing. What she's done.
She twists her fingers, finally, about that small little pearl looped around her neck. Home, friends, people lost, people to gain. She squeezes it tight.
He blusters into the flat little circle, knives already out, something right on his heels. It snaps a claw fierce at him, one of those scorpions made large, made like a Peacekeeper's truck, not an insect. It pulls away, turns as the two face each other. It served its purpose. They're here. Face to face.
It's not quick. It draws out as they circle each other, a slice here, a stab there. He pulls out a chunk of her hair and she takes his ear. It escalates. There's blood everywhere, she can't hear him scream but he lashes back towards her, takes her down. Their limbs tangle and she just wants to live. It's all she wants, all she really could hope for in this. Her spear can't get between them, can't get up close. His knife is in her gut, twisting. She's going to die here. Die slow, die painful, die alone.
Her nails, brittle, broken, find purchase on his face. They tear. He reels back, clutches his eye. It's enough. Her spear lands between his ribs, pierces his heart. They always seem to die so fast on the television and in her books. He dies too slow. He dies in fits and gasps, in bubbling red and startled brown eyes. He dies there atop her, watching her with something awful in his eyes.
Three. She's killed three.
-
The smile pulls back on for the crowds. They carefully stitch up and set all her wounds and shove hearing aids in her ears to make their own interviews easier. They ask her questions that she replies to with smiles and nonanswers. They show her her exploits in the arena, praising her cleverness and her wit and her rising above the odds. They smother her with condescension. They crown her with golden roses and thorns like cactus quills and dress her in soft dusted pinks and deep magentas.
The party that accompanies her crowning is lavish. She's dragged along in dance after dance, hands on her shoulders, her hips, her back. They pull her this way and that and by the end of it, she wants to run and hide. Anything to get away. One of her mentors captures her for a dance and she could weep with the relief of having a moment to not pretend.
It's late in the evening when she thinks she sees him. Dressed in black and gold, masked, but his eyes shine all too familiar. Her hand comes up, her lips open to call him.
Then a solid grip pulls at her wrists, demanding attention in that so Capitol way, and she places back on her smile. They ask her things in slow exaggerated words and it takes all her effort not to roll her eye. She smiles sweet, charming, everything they want from her. They keep her attention for more minutes than she wants and when she looks back over the room, that mysterious stranger is gone. She consoles herself. It wasn't him anyways.
-
Home is now a house in Victor's Village. It feels empty, feels like too much. The bath she soaks in is warm and smells of flowers. The robe she wraps herself in is patterned with cats chasing fish. Her bed is wrapped in silk. The rooms are filled with cool air despite the hot wet air outside.
The luxury chafes. It rubs odd at her skin, at her mind. Three. She killed three people for this. For a box of chocolates at her bedside and delicately scented lotions on her vanity table. For fluffy towels and colorful clothing. For being set apart, above and below, for giving her sister a better chance.
Taria comes in later, combs her hair with infinite patience and has the decency not to mention when Meulin cries.
---
Her palette changes with her schedule.
Monday was all whites and golds, shimmering on her lids and lips and her hair tumbling over her face like she was on a beach. Wednesday is skulls and feathers and she laughs and tells him she's taking his style. He smiles and pulls a feather forward and her breath catches.
Thursday is greens, deep as a forest, like the trees of Seven, and cat tights and cat ear tipped shoes. She has to play the young brilliant victor this time, the sweetheart, the perpetual teenager, and he dresses her young. He knows what games she plays. Friday is a party and so her hair is pulled up and back and her silhouette long. Deep magenta with cuts of soft dusty pink play around her legs and echo around her eyes. Saturday is another party, this one themed and so he pulls back the feathers in pure white, dresses her his angel, his muse, with the briefest hints of green.
Sunday is lazy. Sunday is wearing an oversized purple sweater and some black leggings, laying on his couch and watching him work. Her eyes watch him all quiet, bent over some piece for Derek. His eyes raise to hers, flicker back down.
Sunday is quiet, her own, and so he dresses her just for her.
--
His lips trace the scars on her stomach. His hands run over her sides, down her spine, up into her hair. She's felt such touches before. There was a boyfriend once, then people in the Capitol. He makes it all anew.
His threads brush painful sweet against her breasts, his hands don't claw, push, pull like some did. Like some do. He looks at her like the world, like she's still the girl he knew and she can still see the boy there in him. The world left scars deep on them and he runs fingers soothing over them, takes gentle hold of her heart, cradles it and keeps it safe.
The first time, she'd still had bruises from other hands on her hips, still had scratches in vivid lines down her back. She'd seen the darkness there in his eyes, the possessive urge, the sudden desire to press his fingertips deeper there, to make them his. He doesn't. He didn't. He kisses her lips so soft she cries and he strokes her hair and she doesn't have to hear the silent vow to keep her safe to know it's there.
He touches her, so gentle. He loves her all anew.
It's a jumble. The crowd before her, the way her sister puts that pearl strung on cord in her hands, the way Latula tries to get her eyes to stay on her, her mother and father in tears. She's going to die out there and no one can save her.
There's a whole group of mentors for her. At seventeen, she should stand a chance, but everyone knows she doesn't. She sees it in Derek's eyes, in Chuck's restless hands. Finnick explains things slowly, Annie doesn't speak much at all. Mag is the one there at night, who doesn't speak to her but offers comfort. It's useless right? A deaf girl can't win the games.
So why don't they give up?
-
She builds nets the size of small ships in training. She throws spears that clatter to the ground when she's tested and she looks hopeless but a real person would have been taken to the ground. She smiles bright and wide for the crowd and lets all her chattering come through, even if the questions have to be written down. She waves in delight to the crowd in a sheer thing decked in pearls and brilliant with shimmering scales. She's charming and sweet but sweet never won the games.
Her confidence, small and uncertain as it is, shatters utterly in the confines of the arena. It's desert far as the eye can see, shifting sands that blind and precious water stacked in the cornucopia. She can't take the chance. She can't survive without it. Everyone told her to turn and leave but would she survive a day without it?
The single bottle she snags is just as precious as the spear. The bottle is shoved roughly down her shirt as she runs. The spear is held loosely at her side. She doesn't think she's followed out into the sand but who knows? They could be out of sight. They could be right behind her. She doesn't think about it. She's such an expert at not thinking about it.
Her first night is cold and sudden. The jacket that had been wrapped around her waist hours ago is pulled back on. Her hands wrap tight around the spear as she watches the sky light up with faces. Somewhere the Capitol is watching as she smiles. Not dead yet.
She hasn't given up.
-
The days blur into each other as her water runs low. Desperation drives her on. A smudge of water on the horizon has her going for hours before she suddenly remember the way a haze of land on an open sea can fool a person into going miles off course. The sun beats down on her as her knees hit the sand. She wants to cry.
That night she carves the quills off a cactus, just to see what's within. The inside of the plant glistens in the moonlight, wet. She doesn't cry. Salty tears that will never be pool in her eyes but don't fall. The spines prick at her fingertips as she carves off strips and sucks them dry. Perhaps in the real world, this would dangerous to trust the plant. In the arena, there had to be water. There had to be life. No one wanted to watch a girl die of thirst. Slowly, she feels strength return to her. The morning finds her braiding the spines into her hair, wrapping a few around the other end of her spear. It saved her. It deserves to be put to use.
Maybe she could stay here. Maybe she could just live off the cactus until the rest kill themselves off. It's a foolish hope. No one would want to watch a girl suck the water from a cactus and eat nothing at all. She pulls up her knees to her chin and watches for the mean little scorpions that skitter across the sand.
-
A dark smudge blots the horizon. Meulin watches it. It's bigger now. It's bigger and bigger. Sand is skittering around now, vibrating and moving. Her ears that hear almost nothing can hear the dull dull roar. She launches to her feet, turns, runs.
It catches up with her almost before she can take a full breath. There's sand in her mouth, in her hair. She squeezes her eyes shut, pulls her jacket over her face, and runs blind. The ground shifts under her, trying to trip her, but she's a District Four girl and she knows how to walk on the sand.
It ends as abruptly as it began. The wind stops and sand falls to the ground in sheets. Her jacket is flung off, spraying more sand into the air, and she shakes her hair to fling the stuff off. Her skin feels hot and rubbed raw, shiny pink and red along her knuckles, her cheeks, the insides of her shoes and around her ankles. The sun presses down, flares more heat into those raw wounds. It's alright. She looks around, spots another copse of cacti. Her shoulders drop, every inch of her feeling the relief.
She still has her spear.
Not at all of it is good news though. The land here might be flatter, the dunes punctuated by low stretches of flat land, but that makes her easier to see. It makes it easier to see them coming. She tries to think like a hunter but she's not made for it, not used to it. Her world is pen and paper. She tries anyways.
-
A shimmering dot falls from the night sky. A falling star. She traces its path, waiting for it to disappear, but it falls in a swinging slow motion, delayed, not a falling star at all. The little parachute blinks at her. Soft and insistent as it falls behind a dune merely two dunes away. So long without food, without real water, dulls her reaction. The world spins beneath her, slow and unstoppable. She watches. She realizes. She snaps to her feet. The dunes are hard to climb, wearing out legs already worn out, but she manages not to fall until she has the parachute in her grasp.
It's pulled open with brittle fingernails, breaking one on the stubborn clasp. It would bother her some other day. Now she has treasures, she has food. Bread flecked with green seaweed. Two fish, recently fried, still warm. And the most treasured thing, a bottle of pure clean water. Tears threaten but she pulls up her smile. She looks up, trying to find where a camera might be.
"Thank you. I can't possibly repay you."
She eats everything on those fish down to the eyes. Her bread is wrapped up the parachute. There was no note but she doesn't need it. The eyes of her family, of her District, are on her. She has to do better. She has to try.
She can't give up.
The parachute is big enough to knot in two places, big enough to carry a carefully despined piece of cactus in one side and the oh so precious bread and water in the other. She doesn't know where the Cornucopia is. Everything is a jumble in her head, impossible to sort out. She tries anyways.
-
Her first kill comes all too easily. It shouldn't be that easy to slide a spear into someone's gut, to pull it away and let viscera fly. It should be harder to kill someone. It isn't. The boy in front of her falls to the ground. She hadn't asked questions. She wasn't sweet. She wasn't kind. She wasn't charming or bubbly or excited. She was tired. She was lonely. She wanted to go home.
The next one is harder. They jump her, all too sudden, all too vicious. Her elbow hits their ribs, their knife grabs into her arm, pulls, grates against bone. The scream it pulls from her echoes inside her head. She doesn't remember exactly what happens. More slices to her arm, along her stomach and it threatens to spill her insides out, pink and red, for the world to see. She pulls away somehow. somehow she hefts the spear with her bleeding arm, squeezing the too big wound with the other. Somehow the spear reaches, it hits, it makes it. They fall. The girl--she suddenly realizes--falls. There's probably a sound. Something shivers in her, that cannon made physical in her bones.
Her jacket is tied tight around her stomach. The gash bleeds, not as deep as she thought, but she's nearly died once. This pain will pass. It will fade. It will end. She turns her back on the corpse and clenches her trembling hands around the solid spear.
She doesn't cry.
-
It feels like she's been months in this arena. The desert has sucked the life from her. Lips cracked, thin body pulling in tight on itself, blood caked into her clothing. Two times. She's killed twice. She licks her lips, trying to infuse some moisture into them. It only makes them feel drier. It must be the end, right? She's not sure how much longer she can go on, waiting for death to come. It surely must come for her.
Flashes of light make her look up. She watches a meteor shower streak the beautiful night sky. They're bright. So bright. Too bright. Her eyes widen. The first one hits the ground in the dunes. White hot sand pelts her, even three dunes away, burns into her arm, her shoulder, her back. She screams, curling around that much abused arm. The desert is burning. The sky is aflame, red and yellow and white. It burns, it melts, this desert that withstands such heat burns alive. She'll burn with it.
Death has come for her at last.
She doesn't want it.
The featureless desert gains landmarks, pits of molten glass, burning cacti. The meteors slam into the ground around her, throwing her off her feet, but still she runs. Her lungs protest, her arms, her legs. Everything is stretched and sore and pained. Everything wants to give up. She hits something, slams into it headfirst. It's metal, the first metal she's seen outside her spear in who knows how long. The days have twisted together. Has it been a week? A month? Has she always lived in this arena?
Still, being forced to the cornucopia can only mean one thing.
-
It takes two more minutes for the promised showdown. Usually they arrive right on time, together. Usually it's like that. This unusual lapse gives her time to breath, to cinch the piece of the jacket extra tight. It gives her time to think about what she's doing. What she's done.
She twists her fingers, finally, about that small little pearl looped around her neck. Home, friends, people lost, people to gain. She squeezes it tight.
He blusters into the flat little circle, knives already out, something right on his heels. It snaps a claw fierce at him, one of those scorpions made large, made like a Peacekeeper's truck, not an insect. It pulls away, turns as the two face each other. It served its purpose. They're here. Face to face.
It's not quick. It draws out as they circle each other, a slice here, a stab there. He pulls out a chunk of her hair and she takes his ear. It escalates. There's blood everywhere, she can't hear him scream but he lashes back towards her, takes her down. Their limbs tangle and she just wants to live. It's all she wants, all she really could hope for in this. Her spear can't get between them, can't get up close. His knife is in her gut, twisting. She's going to die here. Die slow, die painful, die alone.
Her nails, brittle, broken, find purchase on his face. They tear. He reels back, clutches his eye. It's enough. Her spear lands between his ribs, pierces his heart. They always seem to die so fast on the television and in her books. He dies too slow. He dies in fits and gasps, in bubbling red and startled brown eyes. He dies there atop her, watching her with something awful in his eyes.
Three. She's killed three.
-
The smile pulls back on for the crowds. They carefully stitch up and set all her wounds and shove hearing aids in her ears to make their own interviews easier. They ask her questions that she replies to with smiles and nonanswers. They show her her exploits in the arena, praising her cleverness and her wit and her rising above the odds. They smother her with condescension. They crown her with golden roses and thorns like cactus quills and dress her in soft dusted pinks and deep magentas.
The party that accompanies her crowning is lavish. She's dragged along in dance after dance, hands on her shoulders, her hips, her back. They pull her this way and that and by the end of it, she wants to run and hide. Anything to get away. One of her mentors captures her for a dance and she could weep with the relief of having a moment to not pretend.
It's late in the evening when she thinks she sees him. Dressed in black and gold, masked, but his eyes shine all too familiar. Her hand comes up, her lips open to call him.
Then a solid grip pulls at her wrists, demanding attention in that so Capitol way, and she places back on her smile. They ask her things in slow exaggerated words and it takes all her effort not to roll her eye. She smiles sweet, charming, everything they want from her. They keep her attention for more minutes than she wants and when she looks back over the room, that mysterious stranger is gone. She consoles herself. It wasn't him anyways.
-
Home is now a house in Victor's Village. It feels empty, feels like too much. The bath she soaks in is warm and smells of flowers. The robe she wraps herself in is patterned with cats chasing fish. Her bed is wrapped in silk. The rooms are filled with cool air despite the hot wet air outside.
The luxury chafes. It rubs odd at her skin, at her mind. Three. She killed three people for this. For a box of chocolates at her bedside and delicately scented lotions on her vanity table. For fluffy towels and colorful clothing. For being set apart, above and below, for giving her sister a better chance.
Taria comes in later, combs her hair with infinite patience and has the decency not to mention when Meulin cries.
---
Her palette changes with her schedule.
Monday was all whites and golds, shimmering on her lids and lips and her hair tumbling over her face like she was on a beach. Wednesday is skulls and feathers and she laughs and tells him she's taking his style. He smiles and pulls a feather forward and her breath catches.
Thursday is greens, deep as a forest, like the trees of Seven, and cat tights and cat ear tipped shoes. She has to play the young brilliant victor this time, the sweetheart, the perpetual teenager, and he dresses her young. He knows what games she plays. Friday is a party and so her hair is pulled up and back and her silhouette long. Deep magenta with cuts of soft dusty pink play around her legs and echo around her eyes. Saturday is another party, this one themed and so he pulls back the feathers in pure white, dresses her his angel, his muse, with the briefest hints of green.
Sunday is lazy. Sunday is wearing an oversized purple sweater and some black leggings, laying on his couch and watching him work. Her eyes watch him all quiet, bent over some piece for Derek. His eyes raise to hers, flicker back down.
Sunday is quiet, her own, and so he dresses her just for her.
--
His lips trace the scars on her stomach. His hands run over her sides, down her spine, up into her hair. She's felt such touches before. There was a boyfriend once, then people in the Capitol. He makes it all anew.
His threads brush painful sweet against her breasts, his hands don't claw, push, pull like some did. Like some do. He looks at her like the world, like she's still the girl he knew and she can still see the boy there in him. The world left scars deep on them and he runs fingers soothing over them, takes gentle hold of her heart, cradles it and keeps it safe.
The first time, she'd still had bruises from other hands on her hips, still had scratches in vivid lines down her back. She'd seen the darkness there in his eyes, the possessive urge, the sudden desire to press his fingertips deeper there, to make them his. He doesn't. He didn't. He kisses her lips so soft she cries and he strokes her hair and she doesn't have to hear the silent vow to keep her safe to know it's there.
He touches her, so gentle. He loves her all anew.
