As strong as the seas are stormy.</style>
Even as they despair over their feelings for one another, cursing the other's name for ever impacting their life, they're both helpless to the possessive love they hold for one another. Hotaru can't help the way she clings to him, digging every bit of her body into Thranduil's. If she could crawl inside him, make her home beneath the arcing skies of his ribs, sink her roots into his soul...she would. If it would make him stay, she would forsake everything. Because she couldn't stand to watch his retreating back, the disappearing shadow on the skyline that she could paint from vivid memories. He'd left her so many times that she'd stopped watching the horizon for his inevitable return, even if it was only to rip another chunk from her aching heart with his ensuing absence. Every moment Thranduil spent at her side, he tangled her further in his golden web. And every moment he left her bereft and abandoned, a shell of the beautiful temptress she'd crafted herself into, those threads tightened to cut into her sinner's flesh. Forced her to bleed for him, as if Hotaru hadn't given enough to Thranduil already.
Even so she continues to give. Gives him her body, complacent and malleable beneath the hard, clinging weight of his frame. Gives him her home, her attention, her muddied love. Despite the cavernous emptiness in her stomach, she can't help the twitch of helpless warmth that coils low in her limbs. Warms her iced-over insides with a spark of glowing filaments. Hotaru can't help but find her breath short and her heart pounding, wrapped up in him like this. Blood and injuries and muddled past be damned. No matter what she tries to convince herself, Thranduil's fingers can still play along her soul like a harp, and she dances to his tune.
And he's right, she's blind to any sway she may have over him. The realization that she was weaker than him, that he had control over a heart she'd long thought dead, had ruined any clarity that came with the realization that she was not alone in her descent into the madness called love. But she'd finally started to see him as he was, even if she could not see the power she held over his golden head. Jaded, beaten, something golden tarnished bronze by the weight and poison of life. He was no longer the perfect, gleaming man that had once intrigued her. No, she could not have fallen for a man like that. Her sorry, romantic heart could never have sworn itself to something so shallow. Maybe it was an Achilles Heel passed down from her mother. A weakness for broken men that hurt and scarred them. For men that could make them feel every shade of emotion created, as no one else ever could. And that's what made all the pain worth it in the end. That Thranduil made her feel so deeply and so violently that it scorched her alive just to be in his presence.
So no matter what happened between them, what bitterness lay in their pasts, Hotaru couldn't help but fall for him over and over again.
"I heard you then," she whispers against the warmth of his battered skin. Of course she had not forgotten his words that evening in the clutch of the evergreen grove. Unlike him, she had been entirely lucid the entire confrontation. And then he was the one backing away, retreating, abandoning her all over again. Hotaru stumbled after him, graceless and stripped, desperate for his touch lest she remember how easily he could take it from her again. With Thranduil's warmth pressed against her, she could forget the world.
"No," she vowed on trembling breath, like the skitter-patter of her aching vessel in her chest. "I see you, Thranduil," came out on a whisper once more, as if the weight of the assurance pressed the volume of her language down to naught by breaths. And how Hotaru had ever managed to slide into his guarded heart was beyond her, but she wouldn't question it. Maybe this was finally something good out of all the bad. Her reward for suffering so much on this terrible, mortal plane. And though she hesitated to grasp it, to be selfish in her wanting, she was finally realizing that he spoke the truth. What a looming truth it was, too, for how it dwarfed her courage in its shadow. It didn't matter though, because Thranduil was finally coming forward again. And Hotaru felt less like she was trapped in this cavern and more like she was coming home at last. To something more than barren walls and nondescript signs of life and dwelling.
Trembling lips slid across the curve of his majestic shoulder, gently clinging to his mane and drawing him back to her breast, afraid she could not cross the expanse to him with how he made her knees tremble. Ashamin was bedrock. Security. Familiar, sweet love. Family dinners and wine and clasped hands. Thranduil was kissing in the rain and screaming fights and slamming doors that were jerked back open for hard, thankless hugs. Because they could not remain apart, no matter how their personalities clashed. Gods, how he made her burn. How she'd hated the power he had over her for so long, and yet now she wanted nothing more than to reel him in closer, to revel in the sweet seduction of the destruction he offered to her with bloodied hands.
“You promised to show me the pain of the past was worth facing. That there is some good in this...in love."
"I did," she breathes, more to herself than anything, but she's lost in the hues of his eyes and the word on his lips she'd never thought she'd hear. And maybe she deserves to be selfish just this once. Maybe it won't turn to fire that consumes her if she lets herself tend to it. She'll take that risk. She has to. She'd break if he left her again. "I will," is whispered in promise back to him, between noses that bump and share breaths as conflicted tears hang in the corners of her eyes. "Thranduil, I will. I'll show you. I promise." And it's said with a vehement desperation that crawls out of her throat like the beginning of a sob as she lets herself break. Bend. As Hotaru shudders and collapses to make room for him inside of her, to give and take and share until they are more than just Hotaru and Thranduil. Until they are a singular entity.
Tenderly, as if they were eternal lovers instead of new, she traces her lips across his brow between his horns. Sweeps his limp forelock from his skin with as much aching love and care as she possesses in her small body. "I'm here, Thranduil. You have me. You always have, and you always will, you stupid man," she laughs, choked and teary as she smiles at him. Drags him closer by the chain around his neck, dancing as near as she can and cursing the gods for the shape of their creation. "Stay. Please. Let me love you." Hotaru would chase away his ghosts and demons, as he had done for her. The detox of his poisonous past. I will love you through it. No matter what it takes.
She could deny him - and herself - no longer. Whatever consequences came from admitting and accepting his love, she would accept them. There was no more running left in her. She would selfishly hoard his miserable, broken love, and give her own in return. And maybe they'd be able to make something beautiful.
| | 
.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
![[Image: 515265280ffff]](http://images.helovia.net/index.php/view/515265280ffff)
