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“I hate him.” Ichabod spits. Venom as thick and bitter as the diamondbacks in the grass drips from his jaw with the words. He bares his teeth at the empty house, painfully quiet in the dead of night.
This house was never meant to be empty. Perhaps quiet – the only sound being raspy shanties sung from the kitchen and low, easy breathing in their bedroom at night – but he promised it would never be empty. He promised!
“I hate him!”
It’s a howl. It’s a whirlwind. It’s the thunder of dry lightning setting summer grass ablaze.
Tassel folds her ears back, glaring at him down the length of her dark muzzle.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” Ichabod snarls back at her. He’s angry and tired and sick of grief – sick with grief. He’s spent all morning chasing his family out of the house when they had the gods-damned audacity to tell him to replace his husband’s gun; he does not have the patience to fight with his soul, too.
His painted dog daemon stands her ground, black paws planted wide and mottled fur raising on her hackles. Her tail raises, stiff and angry, and she lowers her head, fixing him with a vicious glare that he really doesn’t care for.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do, Tassel – you’re my daemon, you know I do!”
“I am your daemon!” She snaps, sharp white teeth glinting in the glow of the embers burning in their soot-stained hearth. “That’s why I know you don’t!”
Her voice is punctuated by a growl, and Ichabod feels his own hackles raise. He tears his eyes away from her, refusing to look at his own soul.
“Shut up, Tassel.”
“No!”
His eyes have landed on a photo of them – the day after their wedding, actually. They both have their dueling guns raised, polished wood and burnished gold flashing in the sun. The barrel of his husband’s gun is already smoking; his darling sureshot couldn’t resist testing the weapon at the first chance he got.
Rage wells in his throat.
“I will not shut up, Ichabod, because we know you don’t mean it, and I will not let you speak about him that way. He and Atalanta–”
“Shut up!”
Atalana stares smugly at him from the photograph. The beautiful russet tone of her feathers is lost to the tinted film, but still she’s outlined by the sun, perched on his husband’s shoulder where she always sat. Her talons dug into the leather patch on his coat, sewn in after she’d poked a few too many holes in his husband’s clothes.
Ichabod had hand-sewn every fucking stitch.
He snatches up the photograph, the wooden frame creaking dangerously in his grip. He swears he can hear the glass screaming.
“He left us!” Ichabod howls, his fury turned on Tassel, his daemon, his soul. Her lips curl up to show her teeth, but she just looks hurt. “He left us! She left you!”
“Ichabod–”
“He promised us forever! He promised, Tassel, and he lied. He fucking lied! He’s fucking gone, and he’s not coming back, and I hate him!”
The picture frame explodes against the opposite wall, the thin wooden frame shattering on impact and glass raining down in a thousand glittering stars.
There is a silence, in which Ichabod pants and Tassel only stares.
Then the tears come burning behind his eyes.
He doesn’t even remember throwing the photo. It lays amongst splintered wood and glimmering shards of glass – a crumpled slip of paper, face down on the floor.
He didn’t mean to throw it. He didn’t.
He doesn’t even remember throwing the photo.
“I don’t mean that,” he breathes, and the air chokes up in his lungs. Hot tears flood his eyes and make his vision wobble as he stumbles forward. It hurts to breathe – it hurts, it hurts.
“I know,” Tassel says.
Ichabod falls to his knees beside the ruined frame. The shards of glass look like silver, look like stars. Firelight flickers across them, the memory of an old familiar dance.
He brushes off the glass dust, careful of the photo beneath, but not so much of his fingers, which sting something awful when he pulls his hand away. The photo itself is about as unharmed as he could hope for – little more than a creased corner and a few scrapes across the sky. He got lucky – none of the damage obscures him or his husband.
“I don’t mean that.”
He doesn’t – not really. He’s angry – he’s so fucking angry – but deep down he knows he could never hate him. Never. The ring on his finger, heavier now than the day he put it on, proves that.
Tassel trods forward to press her head under his chin, pushing him back from the glass until his back rests against a wall. “I know.”
Ichabod curls in on himself, wrapping around his daemon as tight as he can. Tassel presses into him, her warm, heavy body tight against his own. Her chin settles on his shoulder, steady and reassuring, as she squeezes the rest of her body into place on his lap.
He buries his fingers in her fur and turns his face into her neck. The tears are back in full force now, a terrible tidalwave of emotions crashing over him all at once. Heaving sobs and wails and keening cries steal the breath from his burning lungs, and he just clutches his daemon and shakes and shakes and shakes. She’s trembling too, he can feel it, can feel the pulses of grief that travel up the bond – yet she stays steady in his arms, a comfort, a reassurance.
It's not enough. It will never be enough.
He aches for his husband’s arms around him. He always ran hot and Ichabod loved the warmth seeping into his skin. When all seemed wrong with the world, nothing made it better quite like his embrace.
Of course, then he’d just been dealing with failed projects and scheduled launch dates and the struggles of diplomatic communications overseas. Now, with the world crumbling down around him, he needs a hug most – but his husband isn’t here.
He clutches Tassel tighter in his arms, unable to stop the high keening whine that escapes him.
“I miss him,” he admits, thick and watery into the safety of his daemon’s fur.
Tassel heaves in a breath and lets in out in a shuddering sigh that rushes hot past his ear. Where his husband would hold him, Atalanta would groom her fur, drawing her beak through orange and black and white patches until she was quite certain Tassel’s fur was neater than even her own feathers. In Atalanta’s absence, Ichabod has taken to brushing out her fur himself, but both of them know it’s not the same.
She turns her muzzle closer to his neck.
“Me too.”
In his hand, Ichabod shakily clutches the photo of the two of them together, and wonders where his husband could have gone. If he truly left him to rejoin the life of a pirate, or if he’s really just gone. He doesn’t want to think of him being gone gone, about how the chances of finding him alive neared zero months ago.
He just wants to see his husband alive again.
Ichabod forces a tiny, wobbling, tearful smile onto his face – an offering of hope that he’ll get to smile at him like that for real again.
In the photograph, Drey Ferin smiles back.