Chapter Text
It’s a strange thing, what you do to him. He both resents and begrudgingly admires your ability to get to him. What that entails, he isn’t entirely sure. He just knows he wants to grab you by the back of your head, and whether he slams you face first into the wall or smashes his paint slicked mouth over yours is a real toss up.
Regardless of that gamble, either way you’re bound to end up with a few bruises. They mottle your skin in an array of varying cycles of healing; purple, blue, an ugly yellow, and then he’ll top off that palette with a few strokes of red. Thin, superficial lines of crimson, his proverbial brush is a custom stiletto automatic switchblade, sharpened with intent. So yes, regardless of your fate any given day, so long as you are beside him, eager for that retribution for whatever long shot transgression he manifests in his head (to which you always and without fail accept), you are going to end the day with a physical reminder or two - and that’s low balling. The real kicker, he thinks, is that you have this splendid way of walking around the next day with your chin held high and your composure taut - wearing his brand like a badge of honor. Maybe you should get a badge, some participation medal because you’ve survived this long with him, and that’s quite a feat, even he has to admit.
Sometimes, in a brevity of guilt (even acknowledging it makes him angry), and most often after he loses the reins of his control, he’ll extend an olive branch. Well, his definition of an olive branch.
He’ll shove you to the corner of your mattress, sans bed frame and devoid of any warmth, and he will lay down beside you. He won’t say anything, won’t ditch the trench or the myriad of knives that reside in it’s pockets, and then he’ll wrap his arms around your midsection and yank you against him. The way you quiver, an almost imperceptible tremor that accompanies the piteous whimpers you’d often times give, do more to irritate him than anything. Still, he stays there, unnervingly silent and rigid behind you, until exhaustion pulls you under.
It’s in these moments he thinks he should get a medal for patience.
And when you’re asleep, unaware and so enticingly vulnerable, he’ll loosen up; his broad shoulders would sink, his spine lax and his breathing deepen. He’ll smell the shampoo in your hair, run his leather clad hand up and down the slope of your flank, feel the rise and fall of your rib cage as your breathing mellows into a comfortable rhythm - your mind sinking further into a world where he doesn’t exist, and if he does, it would be an impostor in his visage.
He doesn’t know what you dream of at night. With the pain of him fresh, the bruises and the lacerations and the bites still throbbing along the landscape of your body - is it like an echo, a transpose of agony that seeps into your dreams, morphing them into nightmares? He’d be lying if he said the idea didn’t thrill him. That he could turn the safe haven of your head into a birdcage, where you’re trapped in his hold within as well as out.
And what is it, about this omnipotent control that he holds over you, that ignites some baser desire of possession, that he (dare he say) cherishes? The thought brings him back to square one, starting at the beginning. Something about you both infatuates and angers him; both of those in regards to him are deadly, but no matter how furious, how irate, how opaque he sees red, he can never tighten his grip around your neck hard enough to snap it, can never push his stiletto blade far enough to extinguish you -
He can never kill you, and he hates that most of all.