fawningbruises

[fawningbruises]

For the ever-lovely @retquits. His Fields of Mistria OC Monroe and Hayden. I just really needed to draw (and write) for them.

The Ghosts That We Choose

For a long time, he only notices the faint peeling of white paint on the windowsill. Its edge is soaked in morning light. The blue kind, like a cosmic eye opening at the seam. He is vaguely aware of the sheets rustling behind him, and the quiet after.

And then a touch, linen-soft and warm, sends fire first down his spine and then through the hill of his bare shoulder. The scars. The thing that carved them there. He can’t help it when he sucks in the air through his teeth. In a hiss as cold and blue as the morning.

All at once, he feels the familiar flush of shame in his cheeks and the furrow of regret in Hayden’s brow.

“I’m sorry,” Hayden says. “I wasn’t thinking. Again.”

His hand withdraws. A stone in Monroe’s stomach takes its place.

“It’s not you.” Monroe, against his nature, presses as much insistence into the words as he can. Too much, it seems, when he hears his voice quivering on the brink of desperation instead. He says something he thought he had unlearned. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

Hayden is quiet for a long moment. His sheer closeness is the warmth between them in the dark. Monroe knows he’s looking at him. Waiting.

Monroe half-turns to him. Even in the soft shadows of early morning, Hayden’s eyes still give off their own gentle light, like embers drowsing in a hearth.

“Nothing’s wrong with you.” A calm sigh. He runs a hand through his own dark hair. “Sometimes the body just remembers things we try to forget.”

Monroe can’t help just staring at him. The stone in his stomach shifts and he feels light. Hazy. Like the dawn. The blue kind. “I hope so.”

“How’s that?” Hayden asks, drawl soft and slow. Monroe does not miss the hesitation in it. If he were bolder, he would call it fear.

Monroe’s hand tightens around a fistful of sheets. But then he breathes deep, and leans back against Hayden’s chest so his head falls into the curve of his neck. “Because…”

He takes Hayden’s large hand and places it back on his shoulder. Over the scars. Monroe flinches only imperceptibly this time.

“…I want it to remember every single time you’ve ever touched me.”

“Starting now?” Hayden squeezes his shoulder gently. An impulse or an instinct or both, Monroe finds he absolutely adores it.

Hayden moves his head, beard brushing up against Monroe’s ear.

“Or now?”

Monroe’s breath hitches as Hayden dips down to kiss the base of his neck.

“Oh, believe me, it’s already started,” Monroe huffs, off-kilter. His vision’s just the slightest bit out of focus.

Hayden brings his other hand to the other side of Monroe’s pale neck, tucking ocean hair to the side as he holds him there. Whispers against his jaw with a “Well, I sure as blazes hope so.”

Monroe smiles shy in the morning light. It started so long ago.

[fawningbruises]

Fever Halbrand/Morgoth

After the fall of her.

After her fall, he returns to the orc camp, buries himself away in Adar’s tent. Sits upon the dead orc-father’s throne, not-quite-throne, makeshift thing a makeshift king believes is a throne. He sits there for hours, shadows splitting the sun’s pale hand as it moves through the sky, ever-searching.

His throat is dry. His tongue sticks in his mouth, parched and weighted with iron. It is night. Moonless and smothering. Eyes rimmed in red, in the darkness he absently fondles the Nine, gazing over the table into a badly tarnished mirror, palm trails slick through the dust.

Awake.

He moves to sit upon the table before it, warped reflection caged and wild-eyed. There was a name for this form. For this chess piece.

Since before the breaking of the first silence.

Halbrand.

He takes a knife and cuts a neat line down the center of his palm, like a master of the brush, a stroke of deep wet black seeps from his skin. He presses it to the glass of the mirror. His lungs ache with a familiar want. His breath becomes frost and a fever takes hold of him.

He sees a creature there. Not Halbrand, but the makings of him. Long dark hair curls and rivers its way down mountainous shoulders, and eyes, set in a pit of scars, look out at him with a light only the most starving of gods could devour.

“Mairon.” Smoke to the sky.

He growls. “No, but I—”

“Took my face.” Lyrical. “Reformed it to your beauty.”

“I’ve done so much,” he says, “since your fall.”

The fall of you.

There is no response.

“I am,” he tries again. A word goes missing, “without you. Not a crown, but rings. Rings.”

“I am,” the reflection echoes, “not here. This is only a fantasy. What do you want me to say?”

He feels the fever spread between his teeth. His skin is hot, his bleed is steam. “You know.”

You know.

A sigh. Escaping in on itself. A candle flickering. “I would have.”

“Say it!” He barks suddenly, the sheerness of it ripping through the silence. A tear burns upon his cheek. He raises a shaking hand to his face. “I need to hear it.”

The mirror is perfectly still. A mouth opens around a void, and eyes of fire, light under the earth, sear his very bones.

I would have.

He presses himself against the glass, forehead leaning into its cold surface. Sweat like ice. A moth inside a flame.

And for a single moment and no longer, he feels warm breath, rough lips against his neck.

“I would have placed a crown upon your head.”

One by perfect one, the rings in his hand fall to the floor.

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In all timelines, in all possibilities, only you can show me this.

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His voice is a sigh, broken a thousand times over in his throat.

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[Fic] Dragged by the Crown Melkor/Sauron, Sauron/Galadriel The Silmarillion and The Rings of Power (Read on AO3)

Sauron cannot bear the pain in his chest. If it is evidence that he himself can know love, he would sooner rip it out than live long enough to feel it. It takes every effort of his being to hold back tears. In the shadows and the silence, a broken sound escapes his throat. “You stole me first.”

The words have no echo in the throne room. Their earth-struck weight drops heavy, each one a puncture wound in the dark.

(Read on AO3)

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To see their light, reflected in your eyes.

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Here and there, between all things

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ygo favs

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Eternal rivalry looks good on you.

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clean that harvest moon out from under your fingernails

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You only get one night upon the shore so dance like you've never danced before and the dance floor is filling up with blood but oh, lord, you've never been so in love

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Doom impending

Moros, Hades II

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The sun moves to keep you in it.

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“The things I had to do to make it possible.”

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The stag and the mourning dove

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I will ask you for mercy I will come to you blind What you'll see is the worst me Not the last of my kind

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The Serpent and the Myth