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'It's not a crime to defend yourself.' He begins, and you shake your head, leaning almost eagerly towards his touch. "That's what I have told myself, that it is alright because it was out of necessity, and still I feel so entirely... empty. My whole life has been about helping, healing, fixing those that can or cannot help themselves, even when I don't want to, when it feels wrong and even when they have brought it on themselves." You pause, thinking once more of a boy you had found defeated in the rain, pursuing dangers that he couldn't overcome to prove himself to those that already believed in him. "All of it I have seen the damage and the aftermath of violence and silently condemned those that have caused suffering, in flesh and in emotional turmoil, when there is almost always another answer, a better solution though it may not be easier."
You wonder if he will think of himself, if he will doubt the love that has lived in your heart from the moment you began to know him and you reach out, too, positioning yourself carefully within the water to press your nose to the skinny width of his chest, closing your eyes as you smile briefly. You do not, and don't believe you ever will, agree with his tendency towards violence, towards revenge and malevolence however right he may think it is, but you will always forgive him, always eventually see only the reasons behind and not the destruction left in his wake.
It is this awareness of your own blindness in the face of his wrongs that makes you heartsick to think of, to acknowledge; that makes you want to keep him from it in the first place all the more, before you are too used to and accepting of the wicked things he's always claimed he'll do, that makes you even more determined to save him from falling in to the same pit that has sucked you in from the moment what you may have done has dawned on you. From feeling as if his world is slowly closing in around him and knowing that eventually he will no longer be able to run from it. From throwing pieces of himself away until there is nothing left because someone that meant something to him needed him, because there will always be some monster that deserves to pay.
"I have always chose the second, believing it is not my place to deliver punishment, to choose who lives or dies. Except when it came to defending my son from the fiend that had found his way in here, pursuing god knows what. Words would not have moved him. Except this man, and I fear I went too far."
'So I'm glad you left him in pieces. It meant you survived.' It washes over you, the comprehension of how he can find pride in the terrible thing you've done just out of your grasp, your own pride locked away and buried, too strange, too painful to come to terms with just yet.
"I could have run." You had tried, but it had been half-hearted, thwarted by the walls that you had to climb with a man who would have pulled you down, pinned you there, trapped in a room you had gone only to lay memories to rest. "I could have let him..." but you do not finish, remembering what it had been like to simply give in, knowing that it may not have stopped him from trying to flay you anyways. Knowing that it is pure foolishness that makes you even think such a thing. "I could have..." but there is nothing left. You sigh heavily against his skin in defeat, dragging your lips across the muscles of his shoulder in idle thought.
"And maybe there was nothing else I could have done."
There is a but that does not make it right that hangs on your tongue though you do not say it, too exhausted in hearing your own self hatred to share any more with him.
'I did.' You are unsure if it is his confession or the nonchalance of it all in the tone of his voice, the shrug of his shoulders, the implications that could come, but you feel your body go rigid, your heart twisting painfully as it skips a beat. 'I did,' he says, and you tear from him, a sense of betrayal and ridicule pushing your brows together, your lips into a thinly lined frown. And yet you are not even surprised with the fact that he had, maybe you had expected it to some degree, but to hear it come from him—it sets your blood on fire.
"You did." It is flat, a statement more than a question as lines of incredulous disbelief crinkle along your face, as your heart fills with a sore and angry hurt, clawing deep within your soul. You had (foolishly) trusted him to honor your wishes, as you have always tried to do with his, to focus his intents elsewhere beyond the reaches of your own tragedies, your own monsters and demons, so that at least it would not be because of you and your incapability that he would risk his safety, erode his soul for, as if words and wishes would be enough to stop him.
'He wasn't around.'
Your anger seethes just beneath the surface, volitile and scalding as it pulses across your heart, searing away the layers of emotion until there is nothing left except the quiet hiss of its fury snaking through tangled veins. You simply sit, your face turned slightly away once more, afraid that looking at him and seeing the indifference laying there would burst you to flames. There are a million different i told yous and black words that stick to your tongue, heavy and hot like the rest of you, and yet you only grit your teeth together, as (unknowingly) unwilling as him to start another set of arguments, made to bear more verbal assaults and misunderstandings that would only lead to more distance between you when you know that is not what either of you need. And so you wait, wait until the self-soothing sea washes over the embers, makes you numb against the sudden chill in your soul.
Why? you want to ask, though you know the reasons and what would have come next if he had found him. Why, when he should have come with you, back to the Basin so that neither of you would have had to worry. And, rather selfishly, why finding him had been chosen over your safety. The sound of a laugh is expelled as you breathe, your heart closing itself away from the thoughts, that same sick sense of betrayal. "Do you promise?"
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